Safety Brakes Pass Endurance Tests
Safety brakes in Harbour Crane Systems
Safety brakes in harbour crane undercarriage and stroke drives are permanently subjected to endurance tests. Salty ambient conditions, changing climate conditions with high fluctuations in temperature and varying humidity values are per fecty normal in this situation. Thermic stress due to high friction work on emergency brakings is yet another factor with which the brakes have to cope. ROBA-stop-S safety brakes were specially developed for such extreme situations. They have proved themselves for years as suitable for outdoor operation at many harbours worldwide as well as in sundry other applications.
- Harbour crane systems for loading and unloading container ships. Worldwide, more than 400 million container units are handled.
In 2005, more than 400 million container units (TEU) were handled in harbours worldwide (TEU means “Twenty-foot Equivalent Units” and describes an ISO container 8 foot wide by 20 foot long). The Singapore harbour is top of the list with more than 23 Millionen Container Units. In Hamburg harbour, around 8 million containers were transferred from ship to shore or the other way round. The numbers of sent and received containers were roughly the same. From information in a handling prognosis produced in November 2004 by the Institute for Sea Transport Economics and Logistics in Bremen, it is expected that handling of containers in Hamburg harbour will rise to 18 MillionenTEU by the year 2015.
The increase in freight passages and the worldwide increase in transport costs place high demands on logistics and on all systems involved in the process - for example, the harbour cranes, which are responsible for unloading and loading the container ships. High operational safety with minimum downtimes for maintenance and repair work are of primary importance on such cranes. This means that all important components used to make such a crane system function should be reliable, robust and resistant against the aggressive seawater atmosphere. This of course is particularly the case for safety-relevant components, including the brakes in the stroke and undercarriage drives.