A big crane for a small space
10 April 2018A Liebherr LR 11000 crawler crane has installed a 470m3 silo in Oberriet, on the border with Austria. By using such a large crane, Emil Egger AG was able to place the load without needing a derrick for ballast, keeping tailswing down.
The crawler, operated by heavy haulage and transport contractor Emil Egger AG, is currently the most powerful crane in the whole of Switzerland.
The LR 11000 has a lifting capacity of 1000t. The load itself, a Betomat 5/470 mixing plant, coincidentally also made by Liebherr, has a gross weight of only 140t, and a maximum radius of just 16m was involved. Managing director Michael Egger explained the reason for using such a powerful crane to handle the job.
"The benefit of our solution was that using the LR 11000 meant that a derrick jib was not required, which would have been the case if a 500t crawler crane had been used. That would have presented a massive problem because of the extremely constricted space available", he said.
But even in this configuration there was very little space for the crawler crane’s 54m main boom to slew through 180°. A gap of just a few centimetres was left between the turntable ballast on the crawler crane and a Liebherr self-erector on the site.
After the slewing process, the crawler gear on the LR 11000 also had to cover a distance of 8m before the ready-assembled, 15m high silo could be placed on the plant's base unit. The Liebherr crane specialists and assembly team had to withstand sub-zero temperatures and driving snow to complete this work.
