Mammoet’s new Focus 30 crane has performed its inaugural lift, installing a vessel at the refinery in the UK in a top-and-tail operation executed along with a 500t mobile crane.
The global heavy lifting and transport services giant said the new Focus 30 is designed to deliver significant lifting capacity at complex sites and requires no laydown area during assembly of its boom as it is erected vertically in sections. This enables the Focus 30 to be built away from the lift-site and requires the disruption or closure of less infrastructure during its use.
Mommeot added that this theory became a reality during the mobilisation of the crane for the UK refinery lift. A conventional crawler crane would need to be built over a nearby pipe rack and cause a site road to be temporarily closed for a number of days. However, the Focus 30 was manoeuvred in sections around key infrastructure and its boom was raised within the area of the crane’s own footprint, which reduced disruption.
Mammoet first transported the new vessel approximately 3km from a local port, using 36 axle lines of SPMT. It was then positioned in a staging area so that the transport arrangement could be reconfigured to suit onsite requirements.
To facilitate the onsite route, a bespoke ‘book end’ transport frame was used, alongside the hydraulic stroke of the transporters themselves, to navigate the vessel under a number of low pipe racks. Once it reached its installation location, the Focus 30 and a 500-tonne mobile crane were used in tandem to lift the vessel and set it securely on its foundations.
The Focus 30 opens up new and innovative possibilities to engineer complex lifts in equally complex environments. In this case, it drove efficiency by delivering lifting capacity to a very compact location – allowing turnaround activity to continue in areas of the site that would have otherwise been needed to assemble a crawler crane.
In the future, Focus 30 will enable large industrial facilities to expand, delivering increased energy for growing populations worldwide.