Safe cable guidance on STS cranes at high wind speeds

• What was needed: plastic-energy chain
• Requirements: A safe cable routing system was required that could move all cables safely even at wind speeds of over 70 km/h at the harbour.
• Industry: Crane technology
• Success for the customer: Thecables in the old festooning system intertwined and had to be untangled at great expense in terms of time and money to prevent them from being damaged afterwards. With the e-chain®, such work is now completely eliminated. Even after the first few months, the system proved to be the right choice.

The special feature of this ship-to-shore crane is its jib (trolley carrier), which enables it to travel particularly close to the containers to be loaded on ships, thus significantly reducing the loading and unloading time. However, the system requires an enormous amount of power, communication, control and fibre optic cables. The problem in the application relates to the design of the cable routing, where these were hanging freely, similar to a festooning system. In winds in excess of 45 miles per hour, the cables became so tangled that more than 20-30 hours of labour were required to rearrange the system. If the boom was raised or lowered without these precautions, the cables were likely to be damaged, resulting in expensive repairs.

In order to avoid time-consuming and cost-intensive maintenance work on the cables in future, the operator decided in favour of a new cable routing concept. The customer found the answer in a plastic-energy chain from our company, more precisely a guidelok e-chain®, whereby two such chains run in parallel due to the large number of cables. The free-hanging chains connect the jib for picking up the containers with the crane's E-house and guide all cables safely and reliably. It was important to the operators that the cable routing also offered sufficient flexibility to allow the boom to be moved completely during lifting and lowering without restricting it.
The redesign of the cable routing paid off within the first few months of installation. Since then, wind speeds of more than 70 km/h have prevailed at the harbour on several days, and not a single failure of the energy chain system or the cables attached to it has been recorded.