E-Crane: Perfectly balanced ship unloading solution
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The E-Crane is designed specifically for barge and ship unloading, and is a proven and trusted solution in many bulk material handling industries. Most dedicated systems for offloading coal, limestone and other bulk materials are costly, inflexible, and require an expensive, hard to maintain infrastructure. E-Crane’s versatility, reliability and flexibility allows for tailor-made material handling solutions. These custom solutions, combined with E-Crane’s modular design, make E-Crane the ideal equipment for any bulk handling application.
The standard E-Crane product line consists of five series of balanced hydraulic cranes (E-Cranes): 700 Series, 1000 Series, 1500 Series, 2000 Series, and 3000 Series. The E-Crane is placed firmly between production line excavators (or material handlers) and large scale dedicated unloading structures. Even the smallest E-Crane offers much more unloading capacity than the standard excavator, while the larger E-Cranes compete with dedication systems in terms of production but come in at only a fraction of the installed cost with even less annual maintenance costs. The E-Crane series offers models with up to 50 tonnes duty cycle capacity and outreaches of up to 150ft (50m).
The E-Crane is a truly revolutionary material handling machine as its main design feature is a parallelogram style boom configuration which allows the machine to be in near perfect balance throughout its working range. This ‘4-bar’ design allows gravity to work for you instead of against you, reducing horsepower requirements and power consumption. The design of the E-Crane also allows for durability and longevity, taking structural fatigue and component life into account, making it the ideal solution for dedicated tasks like ship unloading that require repetitive cycles.
CASE STUDY: NOVA SCOTIA POWER
A 2000 Series/Model 21382 GA-E E-Crane currently operates at the Nova Scotia Power facility in Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia. E-Crane and Nova Scotia Power (NSPI) worked with Montreal- based Savage CANAC Corporation to commission the crane on the dock at the Point Tupper Marine Terminal.
The marine terminal at Point Tupper is located directly on the shipping route between North America and Europe and is the deepest ice-free harbor in North America. This allows for ultra- large vessels carrying a variety of bulk cargo products to be unloaded at this terminal. The E-Crane on the dock is designed to unload panamax sized vessels using a 23m3 hydraulic coal grab. The E-Crane offloads these Panamax vessels with 50–70-second cycles, achieving offloading rates of more than 1,000tph (tonnes per hour) ‘through hatch’.
The E-Crane is mounted on a high portal rail undercarriage and features a connecting link to the receiving hopper. This link allows the hopper to travel along the rails with the E-Crane to assure a constant distance between the hopper and the crane for ease of operation. The dock itself is 134 metres long and 13.6 metres wide to accommodate a wide range of vessels. The small size of the dock was a limiting factor for the project, but the balanced design of the E-Crane allowed engineers to keep the dock size small. As there was no room to assemble the E-Crane on site, the E-Crane was put together on shore in Belgium and delivered to the site fully assembled with a total operating weight of 385,000kg. The entire crane was lifted onto a Jumbo Transport ship equipped with two, 800-tonne cranes, shipped, and then offloaded by the same vessel at the NSPI terminal. The E-Crane was successfully commissioned and continues to unload panamax sized vessels at high rates. NSPI operators are very happy with the E-Crane and enjoy operating it.
