WE ARE YOUR SOLUTION
The rotating crab at Valmont
makes handling easier and enhances
productivity
The rotating crab at Valmont
makes handling easier and enhances
productivity
Valmont is a world-renowned company that manufactures street lighting poles, traffic signal poles, utility poles, communication poles and poles to light up large sports complexes and stadiums, with manufacturing locations spread around the world. In India, Valmont has a large manufacturing plant at Indapur (Maharashtra). The plant is designed to facilitate a linear flow of material right from the entry of the raw material to the finished product at the despatch bay. The plant is equipped with state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment.
Valmont needed cranes to integrate handling right from the entry of raw material to the final stage of processing and despatch. At the beginning of the manufacturing process, in the steel yard the pole stacks are required to be lifted and placed onto the conveyors at the entrance of the fabrication shed/bay. This necessitated lifting and then rotating of poles by 900. Conventional cranes pose a limitation in rotating the poles automatically and placing them precisely on the conveyors. This made the handling requirement from the EOT crane in this area most challenging.
Recognising our ability to develop customised solutions for even the most challenging requirements, Valmont approached us to design a crane solution to integrate the handling requirements in their entire plant. The material handling requirement in their steel yard, outside the factory shed for handling pole stacks and placing them precisely on the fabrication conveyors posed a real challenge.
At Valmont, ElectroMech installed a total of 22 cranes throughout their manufacturing plant at several locations performing different applications. These cranes are being used at various stages in manufacturing, right from the unloading and carriage of steel poles from the steel yard to placing the poles on the conveyor for fabrication followed by a galvanisation process and then to the final despatch yard. The cranes used in the main manufacturing bays are of standard configurations and are used for performing rigorous applications.
There are cranes installed in 5 different bays at Valmont which include the steel yard, fabrication bays, stores, galvanising bay and despatch area. 20 cranes are installed in the indoor area while two cranes are operated in the outdoor which consist of one 10/10MT single girder crane at the despatch area while the other 10/10MT double girder crane with a rotating crab between the steel yard and the fabrication bays. The fabrication shed consists of a combination of 13 cranes of different types and capacities altogether, ranging from 5/5MT to 8/8MT with the span of 17.6m to 23.46m of double girder and jib cranes. One single girder crane of 5MT capacity with a span of 10.5m is operated in the stores area, while six double girder cranes of 16MT capacity with 24m span are installed in the galvanising plant, where the steel poles undergo Seven Tank Galvanising process.
The engineering team at ElectroMech analysed the conditions and designed an innovative and cost-effective material handling equipment for the steel yard. Using a conventional EOT crane was ruled out because rotating the poles would have been a very cumbersome process, involving manual intervention to do the job. Considering this aspect, our engineers designed a special crane with a rotating crab. This innovative design permitted extreme flexibility and ease of work. This one of its kind rotating crab is capable of rotating the object by 3600 in clockwise or anticlockwise motion. The special design consists of two hoists of 10MT capacity each, mounted on a rotating crab of a double girder crane. The span of the crane is 17.6m and the height of lift is 7.6m. It can lift a load up to 20MT. The steel poles from the steel yard are lifted using this special purpose crane, turned by 900 to bring them in line with the conveyor in the fabrication bay and then carefully placed on the conveyor. Here, the steel poles are bifurcated into large poles and small poles according to their diameter sizes and then transferred to the respective fabrication bays. This ingeniously designed system resulted in a tremendous amount of saving in labor, time and enhanced productivity at Valmont.
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