6 Ton Single Girder Foundry Crane for A Zimbabwe Steel Mill

We were contacted by a customer from Zimbabwe who is in the steel manufacturing industry and wanted to purchase a single girder overhead crane. Customers say that when choosing a crane, they value the equipment's operational performance in high temperature, dusty and continuous working conditions. It is also desired to avoid high acquisition costs.

Customer background

1. Customer Industry: A medium-sized steel foundry
2. Industry: Iron and Steel Smelting and Casting
3. Main business: Production of mining wear parts, railroad cast steel parts, engineering machinery parts

This steel mill mainly uses medium frequency furnaces to melt scrap steel, and then pours the steel into ingots or castings. Prior to this, the workshop mainly relied on forklifts and manual handling of molds, scrap and semi-finished products, which was not only inefficient, but also a major safety hazard in the high-temperature environment. As their order book grew, they urgently needed an overhead crane that could cover the main work area of the foundry.

Lifting requirements and site conditions

The specific needs of the client are as follows:

1. Lifting capacity: 6 tons (for lifting scrap ladles, ingot molds, pouring ladles and finished castings)
2. Span: approx. 10.5 meters (matching workshop column spacing)
3. Lifting height: 7 metersSatisfy the height of the steel water package from the ground to the pouring mouth.
4. Working level: A6

Major challenges in the environment

1. High temperature radiation

When the steel water package is lifted, the crane main beam and hoist are directly exposed to strong heat radiation. The wire ropes and electrical components of ordinary cranes will deteriorate rapidly in the continuous high temperature, and even cause safety accidents.

2. Metal Dust and Splash

The melting and pouring process generates large amounts of metal oxide dust, as well as occasional steel splashing. Dust can easily get into the motor, resistor box and running wheel bearings, causing stalling or short-circuiting.

3. Space constraints

The new workshop has a compact design, with little spacing between columns and ventilation ducts above. The customer was unable to install a double girder overhead crane and had to opt for the more compact single girder form.

4. Frequent starts and stops and precise positioning

The ladle needs to be transported smoothly to the gate and then precisely aligned with the mold sprue. If the crane starts and brakes with too much impact, the steel shakes and overflows, which can cause serious safety accidents and scrap.

Our Solution

Our company's sales engineers have long been responsible for the design of lifting programs in steel, metallurgy and other industries, and have a wealth of lifting programs in steel mills. She finalized the client's real working conditions through several video conferences at a later stage and decided on the final solution.

1. High-temperature resistant protection: Heat-insulating reflective plate is added under the main beam, the hoist shell is sprayed with high-temperature resistant ceramic coating, and the wire rope adopts asbestos core + high-temperature grease to ensure normal operation under ambient temperature of 80°C.
2. Dust and Splash Protection: The hoisting motor and traveling motor are IP54 protected with dust cover. All limit switches are enclosed dustproof models with the control box mounted on the side of the column away from the heat source.
3. Compact single-beam design: The height of the whole machine is controlled within 950mm, making full use of the limited headroom. Meanwhile, it adopts soft-start frequency conversion control, which makes the starting and running smooth and shockless, and eliminates the risk of steel shaking.
4. Metallurgy-specific configuration: Equipped with overload limiter, fire-break limiter, emergency power-off switch, and additional heat-sensing alarm device - automatically alarms and prompts the operator to evacuate when the temperature under the crane exceeds the set value.

Final results

After two weeks of technical communication and business exchange, the customer was finally impressed by our professional solutions and sincere attitude, and chose to purchase this bridge crane in Yuantai. And the contract was formalized in August.