CASAR has been selected to provide its ropes for the largest tower crane in the world.
The order involves the new roping of a 330t Favelle Favco tower crane with luffing jib of the Australian Marr Contracting PTY LTD.
This crane will be used for 14 months starting in July, in order to construct the Canakkale 1915 suspension bridge over the Dardanelles, a strait in the Mediterranean between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara.
This suspension bridge has a width of 36m and carries a 6-lane motorway. It is an important component of the $2.8bn difficult Kinali-Balikesir motorway project.
The total length of the bridge is 5,169m, with the distance between the two main pillars being 2,023m. Measured at the span length it thus supersedes the Akashi-Kaikyo bridge in Japan and wins the title of ‘longest suspension bridge in the world’.
The completion date is set for 2023, which is the year of the one-hundredth anniversary of the establishment of modern Turkey.
Marr, an Australian specialist for heavy-duty equipment, deliberately decided to use the 330t Favelle Favco M2480D, since this has already proven its extraordinary capabilities in the past.
The success story of this crane began almost exactly ten years ago in the construction of a waste-to-energy plant in Qatar. Here, the M2480D attracted such a great deal of attention because it is able to operate on the narrowest space and can also place large elements exactly to the millimetre.
If the crane is built on its support beams, it only occupies a ground area of approximately 4m² or, alternatively, the area of two side-by-side parked cars. In addition, the crane is immensely fast. Thus, loads of up to 110t in two-strand operation are carried out, whereby comparable crawler cranes work with up to ten strands and need up to ten times the space. The 55t winch can coil up to 95.5m/min and complete the high-speed power package.
Of course, all this also puts the highest requirements on our CASAR ropes that are used. In order to be able to run such large loads in two-strand operation, the ropes have to achieve high breaking strength.
A Ø54mm CASAR Eurolift with a tensile strength of 2,160N/mm² is therefore used as a hoist rope. CASAR Eurolift has proven itself for many years in all types of hoisting applications and is always used when the highest rotational stability is required.
In addition, the rope is characterised by its outstanding winding behaviour on multi-layered drums.
Our CASAR Parafit with a diameter 42mm is used as a boom luffing rope. Through its high fill factor, resulting from the special hammer compression, it is predestined for this difficult application with high surface pressure.
The crane in Turkey is a modified version of the M2480D with an extra-large drum, to
be able to accommodate 1,220m of the 54mm Eurolift. The ‘Standard’ M2480D operates with 600m-long hoisting ropes. The crane’s auxiliary winch is equipped with 36mm CASAR Eurolift. A total of three hoisting ropes were ordered each at 1,220m, which includes two have been delivered directly to the construction site in Turkey; the third remains in Germany at CASAR as a replacement rope.