Bespoke process cranes for high technology production go global 

Street Crane
Street Crane

Overhead cranes are essential in many manufacturing operations to deliver productivity and maximise return on capital. Taking this a stage further, process cranes, where the crane design is optimised to the production process, provide the agility required to meet variable production demands and the challenges of flexible manufacturing. PES reports.

Modern crane design is a complex process that often undergoes many iterations to deliver the safety, optimum performance, spatial efficiency and reliability required, without compromising the building’s integrity.

Optimising crane design depends on multiple factors. Some of these are physical, such as the height and span of the manufacturing bay, required height of lift and available height envelope of the building. Others are operational factors such as the maximum safe working load (SWL), the load dimensions, load variability and the frequency and speed of crane movements required.

Every crane is different and unique, but some situations have common characteristics for which special cranes have been developed. Motor industry press shops, for example, reflecting the influence of Japanese lean manufacturing philosophy, commonly have multi-function presses to manufacture different panels in sequence.

Downtime on these units, many of which represent an investment of tens of millions of pounds, must be minimised, so cranes are required for die-swaps that allow these tools to be placed with speed and precision.

In aircraft manufacture and in their maintenance repair and overhaul, building constraints often dictate crane design. Wide span hangars are essential in this application, but such structures can be prone to flex under wind load. To meet this need cranes have been developed with hinged supports that allow the crane beam to deflect with the structure.

The wide span buildings required by aerospace manufacturers flex under wind load. Cranes must therefore be engineered to accommodate this deflection as shown here with these double girder cranes at Spirit Aerosystems in Northern Ireland

Complex technical and commercial calculations are required to optimise the crane configuration. This may go through several iterations as the operation of the crane is refined during discussion. Each set of calculations can take several hours or longer, limiting the number of possible designs that can be considered cost effectively.

To address this limitation, Street Crane has developed a software package, Eazycrane, that reduces these calculations to just minutes, allowing many production scenarios to be modelled to produce the optimum design for each situation. Whatever the requirement the system will select the most appropriate hoists, travelling equipment and advanced controls from a vast database of pre-engineered elements.

More than this, the system also produces detailed manufacturing drawings, quotations, sales materials and parts lists – streaming data into the manufacturing system and supply chain to turbocharge the whole delivery cycle.

Modern manufacturing challenges


Addressing the issue that the UK is sometimes hesitant at commercialising ideas from the academic world and slow to adopt new manufacturing technologies, The Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) in Coventry bridges the gap between universities and the manufacturing industry. The site is the National Centre for Additive Manufacturing and has state-of-the-art tooling, workshops and laboratories.

The centre serves as a demonstration unit for new technology and enables techniques for new product production to be perfected. Equipment installed includes: additive manufacturing machines, multi-axis machining centres, robotic workstations and other advanced equipment and software.

For efficient material and product transfer and to facilitate periodic re-tooling the main workshop has a 15-tonne double girder crane spanning the 5.2m workshop featuring a ZX86 hoist. The Street hoist design ensures a true vertical lift and precisely controlled load placement. The crane traverses the full length of the workshop providing efficient access to the whole production area, without taking up floor space itself.

Specialist moulding manufacturer Formaplex has a fleet of Street cranes over four sites

Formaplex is another high technology crane user. The company supply complex moulded components in carbon fibre, composites and polymer for clients in aerospace, motorsport, defence, medical and other demanding sectors. In-house machining of moulding dies ensures that the company can meet client needs effectively.

At its new Voyager Park factory the company has installed a 30-tonne double girder and a five-tonne single girder crane occupying a 132m gantry system providing capacity for heavy and lighter lifts. In use 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the cranes lift and position injection mould tooling into presses. A total of 16 mould presses are in operation, producing three million moulded components a year such as dashboards, centre consoles and complete bumper systems for the automotive industry.

Serving companies with overseas operations


Street Crane has been making process and factory cranes for over 70 years and has built over 100,000 units, representing a vast pool of knowledge in problem solving for different industries. In the UK the company supplies around 400 complete cranes per year. These comprise the major structures such as beams, crane rails and gantries together with the electro-mechanical components such as the end trucks, carriages, hoists and sophisticated controls. For more complex lifting the company also supply specialised equipment.

The weight, bulk and shipping cost of crane structures means that the factory crane business is national and regional. Street has partnerships with 120 overseas crane makers serving their local markets in 48 countries. To these companies Street supplies hoists travelling equipment and controls – the higher value and more easily shipped elements of the crane. Supporting this, the company opened a new hoist works, producing 2,500 hoists per year and capable of expansion to meet further export demand.

Street was an early pioneer of CAD and has continued to use technology to gain technical and commercial advantage. With the introduction of Eazycrane to perform complex calculations, the design time for even the most complex cranes is reduced from hours or days to just minutes. Street is now sharing this design platform with its overseas partners, ensuring that their UK derived crane expertise is available worldwide.

This workshop at the MTC in Coventry provides a flexible environment for the development of advanced manufacturing processes and uses Street Cranes for precise and efficient material transfer

Eazycrane is customisable to local technical standards, including UK/European, Canadian and USA codes, ensuring that cranes are fully compliant in every respect. O’Brien Lifting Solutions of Ontario, Canada, were one of the beta-test partners in the project. Vice president of operations, Randy Mullin, notes:

“Our sales team is amazed that they can turn around quotations so quickly and provide such a depth of technical information about the crane, and with a bit of practice the team can produce an accurate drawing showing all necessary dimensions required to satisfy the customer’s needs. It is truly a gamechanger for us.”

Eazycrane is Internet-based and hosted, so it is easily accessed anywhere on any mobile device. This also means that minimal investment is required by Street’s international partners to access the system. Enabling this ease of access and shrinking the speed of computation of millions of possibilities to a matter of minutes were major technical challenges that had to be overcome.

Ensuring reliable aftersales service - internationally


Downtime is dreaded by any process manufacturer. Not being able to load and unload expensive capital equipment because the process crane requires maintenance has to be avoided at all costs – especially if that crane is half way around the world. To ensure rapid return to working order, Eazycrane, which has already been a five-year, self-financed, development programme, will continue to evolve.

To speed parts ordering the next stage of development will be a parts portal. This will enable the crane maker, wherever it is, to input the unique serial number for the crane into Eazycrane and generate a full bill-of-materials for that particular crane. Items such as ropes, rope guides, brake parts and limit switches can then be ordered with confidence knowing that they are exact matches for the original equipment.

This will ensure only the correct parts are despatched and that the process crane, however unique, will be back up and running as quickly as possible.

Established 75 years ago and with 350 staff across six sites, family-owned Street Crane is the UK’s largest overhead crane and hoist manufacturer with annual revenues of over £70 million.

The business is a major exporter, supplying crane kits and components through a network of over 120 partners across 48 countries. It has installed more than 100,000 overhead cranes around the world.

Its main manufacturing plant is in Derbyshire, with a service and spares division in Sheffield.

Street Crane Company www.streetcrane.co.uk

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Street Crane

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