The new GTK 1100 from Manitowoc has been pitched squarely at wind turbine erectors. Its small footprint and fast erection time certainly make it useful for lifting heavy nacelles on wind turbine sites, but a job in December 2007 showed that it can work on more than this one application.
Wiesbauer, Manitowoc’s first customer for the GTK 1100, used it to erect a Wilbert tower crane at a nuclear power plant in Lingen. Technical manager Jochen Wiesbauer explains why Wiesbauer chose this crane: “We were going to be standing inside the cooling tower. If we’d worked with a lattice boom crane or a telecopic with a luffing jib, we would have needed to work from outside the cooling tower, and would have needed a jib with 50-60m outreach. We would have needed up to 70m to erect it. We only had 60m inside the tower, and no space outside.
“We could erect the GTK 1100 inside the tower, and only needed 30m on the ground for the complete erection, including the assist crane. To erect a normal lattice crane would have taken two days, as well as taking up a lot of space in the busy power plant. Erecting the GTK only took eight hours.”
Wilbert is a manufacturer and also a crane rental company-“so it manufactured, and then operated, the tower crane on site. Sales manager Gunter Krönewitter says, “We’re building a cooling tower in the gas-based Emsland Power station in Lingen. We started at the job site with a trolley jib crane to do some prefabrications where a luffing jib crane is not necessarily needed. Then the upper part of this first crane was dismantled, the tower was heightened and the WT 205L e.tronic was erected on the top. The WT 205L e.tronic is erected on foundation anchors and has a freestanding tower height of 112.95m. Its jib length is 42 m, so heights under hook up to 154.95 m can be reached.
“The WT 205L e.tronic is placed in the middle of the new cooling tower to build it. The assembly could have been executed with any other ‘normal’ mobile crane. However, we decided to use the GTK 1100 because when the cooling tower is built we want to dismantle the WT 205L e.tronic with that crane standing inside the cooling tower.
“Therefore it was a good chance to test the GTK 1100. One advantage was that the GTK was tested at maximum height and so there is no need to climb up the WT 205L e.tronic later.
“A disadvantage of using the GTK 1100 is that it is much more expensive than using a ‘normal’ big mobile crane. As long as the prices do not rise very much, we would consider using it again.”
Jochen Wiesbauer says that the Wilbert crew working to erect the tower crane reported that the crane was very stable in the wind: “They said there was no movement on the upper structure.”
Wiesbauer has used the GTK 1100 on two wind projects so far. The crane is also planned to erect a 140m high chimney at a steel refinery in Dielingen, Germany.
