Safety systems

Ascorel and SMIE have obvious similarities as companies. Both are French and they both manufacture operator assistance devices. Both depend quite heavily, though by no means totally, on the French tower crane market. In recent years they have both endured difficult market conditions, but right now – with sales of tower cranes having risen 47% from 295 to 433 units last year – both are looking forward with the kind of optimism that they have not had for quite a while.

Ascorel is a limited company, established in 1988, which today turns over FFr35m ($5.2m), with 25% coming from exports. The company provides safety devices on construction plant, but particularly focuses on lifting equipment. It supplies safe load indicators to Grove, Terex PPM and Pinguely Haulotte, load and outreach limiters to aerial platform manufacturer Bronto, load limiters for bridge cranes and Potain’s tower cranes, and weighing systems for loaders and excavators for Volvo and Caterpillar in France.

Ascorel also produces an anti-collision system for tower cranes which allows up to 16 cranes to be controlled at the same time, either by a wired connection or by radio data transmission. Potain markets its Ascorel anti-collision system under the name Top Tracing. Potain says that while contractors have found previous anti-collision systems difficult to operate, this new system is much easier to use. For greater safety, integral speed monitoring gives dynamic control over cranes while they are moving, thus making it possible to give the operator a warning before operations have to be cut out.

Potain’s managing director in Asia, Eric Etchart, reports that Top Tracing is taking off in Singapore and Hong Kong, with all nine cranes on the Shimizu project in Singapore being equipped with it.

Out of expertise developed for Potain’s tower crane safety systems, Ascorel has also developed an anti-collision system for aircraft boarding gangways, for when two or more gangways are close alongside an aircraft.

As well as construction equipment manufacturers, Ascorel’s clients include the French army and SNCF, the national railway. It is also the French distributor of Hetronic, the German remote controls systems manufacturer.

New from Ascorel, and on show at Intermat, is the MC 320 safe load indicator for mobile cranes, boasting a clear display and connections of CAN-Bus standard.

Intermat marks the return of Ascorel to SLIs. Ten years ago it was the SLI market leader in France, supplying mobile crane manufacturer PPM. But after it joined up with rival manufacturer PAT, which took a 40% stake in Ascorel, it concentrated mainly on weighing systems. However, says sales manager Alain Defillon, various PAT agents have started promoting Ascorel’s SLIs instead of PAT’s. OEMs using Ascorel’s SLIs include Marchetti and Locatelli, he says. Defillon expects sales of Ascorel-made SLIs to rise from 20 or 30 units a year to about 200 units this year, though some of these will be branded as PAT.

SMIE, though smaller than Ascorel with a turnover in 1999 of FFr21m ($3.1m) and 21 employees to Ascorel’s 43, lays claim to being a pioneer in crane safety and operator assistance devices. It was established by the current president and managing director Jean-Louis Olivier back in 1975.

It launched the first anti-collision system in 1985, three years before Ascorel was founded. Its system works on very similar principles to Ascorel’s. Prohibited zones are keyed in and the cranes are prevented from swinging over them. When they reach pre-programmed limits, the cranes cut out.

SMIE also offers a prohibited zone activation device that it calls a Bazil box, into which up to six prohibited zones can be keyed in. The box is positioned at the foot of the crane and connects into the anti-collision system. The site manager, or key holder, can flick switches to change the anti-collision regime that governs the cranes. Bazil was developed for the contractor Fougerolle on a project at Paris Gare du Nord railway station last December. To date that site is the only application of the technology.

SMIE has also developed a range of other devices, such as wind speed indicators and the CAD 40 travel sensor for monitoring crane wheel slippage. New for Intermat is the BIA 2000, which feeds information about crane operations through to the site office, either by cable or radio, and is thus a step towards remote site maintenance. And soon (Bauma 2001 is the target) we will be able to see the AC4X, which records crane operating data to make possible a switch from preventive to predictive maintenance.

While the Potain relationship appears to have given Ascorel a commercial edge over SMIE, Jean-Louis Olivier is targeting Liebherr with a new anti-collision system. He says that he backed away from Potain when discussions were held about developing a system for the leading French manufacturer because he did not like the terms on offer. Commercially, it may have been a mistake. Olivier seems to acknowledge that the last few years might have been easier for SMIE had he, and not his rival, tied up with Potain, but it is not something he appears to regret.

For its part, Potain says it chose Ascorel based on its technical evaluation of the systems offered.

SMIE is now looking to develop a relationship with Liebherr instead. Specifically designed for use on Liebherr tower cranes is the ILM 40 multi-sensor interface. It is designed to connect the five sensors (slewing, speed, lowering, lifting and travelling) and transmit the data to SMIE’s anti-collision system. It has not yet been used on site but contractor SAE will soon have it on 20 Liebherr cranes, according to Olivier.

While the Potain connection has made France a healthy market for Ascorel, SMIE’s best customer is its UK agent Cranesafe. Tim Rowley, managing director of Cranesafe, says: “Compared with their French counterparts, British tower crane users were slow to adopt the [anti-collision] system in the early days. This is partly because French law requires the use of such systems, while British law has been less specific about the measures required to safeguard against collisions.” But 1999 marked a turning point for Cranesafe, with SMIE’s anti-collision systems in action at 10 sites in the UK by the year-end, and sales of the AN41 anemometer at about 10 a month. Rowley attributes growth in anti-collision devices in the UK to the CDM, or Construction (Design & Management), regulations which place new safety responsibilities on designers and contractors.

SMIE anti-collision systems are currently being used on four Comedil cranes at the new SmithKline Beecham head office construction site in west London. The cranes are 89m, 77m, 57m and 52m high. “The units were free standing which, in the case of the 89m high crane was quite unusual as these are usually tied into the buildings,” says Peter Goss of Select Tower Cranes, the rental company which supplied the cranes. “We used SMIE devices on two cranes to ensure that their loads did not swing over a nearby public park.” SMIE is also the French agent for Prokrania, the Swedish manufacturer of the Procab elevating operator’s cabin for tower cranes, as featured on the news pages of the March issue of Cranes Today.

Until now SMIE has worked exclusively in the construction industry, predominantly supplying tower crane manufacturers and end-users. Looking forward, however, Olivier has his sights on a wider client base. “Our future may be in EOTs, dockside and industrial cranes,” he says.