Strele lifts 49t chimney
21 March 2018Baltic mobile crane rental company Strele Logistics supplied lifting and rigging equipment, including a Modulift spreader beam, as a 49t chimney was installed at a biological waste treatment facility in Kaunas, Lithuania.
The task was carried out in February. It involved loading the 35m-long, 2.75m-diameter pipe at its site of manufacture, the facility of the Enerstena Group’s facility, and transporting it 3km to erect it in its final position.
Two 15t capacity overhead cranes that were already installed in the Ernesta building and a 90t Tadano Faun ATF90G-4 mobile crane were used to load the chimney onto a semi-trailer. The haulage company Klaipedos Transekspedicija transported it overnight to the jobsite.
The next morning a 500t capacity Liebherr LTM1500-8.1 and 200t capacity Terex AC200 combined in a tandem lift to complete the project. The Terex was used for the tailing. Below the hook of the Liebher, a MOD 70 beam was used at 3m length, attached to rigging points set on the outside of the chimney.
Jokubas Slavinskas, project manager at Strele, explained that at one stage a second spreader beam had been considered for the Terex but instead it was decided to use synthetic slings. Four 10m roundslings, four 7m steel cables, two 25t shackles, two 55t shackles, and two 85t shackles - the last four connected to the spreader beam - combined to complete the lift.
“The steel cables were set on the rigging loops of the chimney” said Slavinskas. “We could not use synthetic slings there because the friction force could have burnt them during the erection process. The tandem lift was the most reliable option. There were alternatives but they were economically and logistically inferior.”
In the lifting process the Terex crane had to tail the chimney to a position 15m from the Liebherr. Then the main crane took the chimney alone and mounted it onto the foundation. The only problem to overcome was turning the truck transporting the chimney 90 degrees, which required clearing away some of the site’s waste pile.
“The lifting process took no more than three hours” said Slavinskas. “It took longer than that to assemble the main crane and to disassemble it: each of those was a four hour job. Strele has completed hundreds of projects of this kind. One peculiarity was that there was only one lift involved in this project. Chimneys are more commonly erected in multiple sections, of, say, 20m in length.”
The MOD 70 spreader beam can lift up to 70t at 10.5m (33 ft) and lesser loads at up to 14m (45ft).
