An inland vessel with a 318-tonne generator and a 335-tonne gas turbine on board was ready to be unloaded. Teamwork is now called for.
The destination of the two components was the coal-fired power station in Marbach am Neckar, which was built back in 1942. “This power station serves as a so-called cold reserve for the energy supply in Baden-Württemberg and above all the nearby city of Stuttgart,” says Cometto Sales Manager Joachim Kolb, describing the framework conditions. “That means that the power station, with its short ramp-up time, only starts up when the power requirement is particularly high.”
In tandem lift from the ship
The interaction of various lifting and transport devices was necessary in order to cover the distance to the place of assembly. Due to the necessary extension over a building, two crawler cranes were initially in operation: a Demag CC 2800 from Wiesbauer itself and a Liebherr LR 1600 from the crane service provider Neeb. The components were lifted in tandem off the ship and over a warehouse building with a sense of proportion.
The two crawler cranes then reversed in synchronisation on the mats that had been laid out. Now it was the turn of the Cometto SPMT self-propelled vehicle. Joachim Kolb underlines the team concept in this project: “In this cross-hire-rental operation, Wiesbauer procured extra axle lines from the vehicle fleet of Schares Autokrane GmbH.”
In total, the experts assembled a side-by-side combination with 2 x 12 axle lines. The whole thing is driven by two power packs with outputs of 129 kW and 202 kW.
With precision even through bottlenecks
The 4-file combination thus created, with an impressive total width of 5,330 millimetres, made its way between the crawler cranes, precisely steered by Leonard Schmid. In front of the two cranes, the combination then performed a 90-degree carousel drive and positioned itself for cargo pickup. Following another 90-degree carousel drive, the combination passed between the cranes once more and onto the road to the power station.
Having arrived there, the crew had to negotiate one final bottleneck near the works gate. “And for the transfer of the load to the lifting frame, the Cometto self-propelled vehicle pulled another ace out of its sleeve,” says Joachim Kolb, alluding to the electronic steering, “because only then is it really possible to position such loads to the precise millimetre.
The Wiesbauer motto puts it in a nutshell: ‘Make heavy work easy!’”
Publication date: 01/2022