IN FOCUS / ZOOMLION
ZOOMLION LAUNCHES 450 TONNE CAPACITY TOWER CRANE Zoomlion releases world’s largest top-slewing tower crane, leading the era of super-large tower cranes. ACCORDING TO ZOOMLION, THE RECENTLY released W12000-450 is the world’s largest top-slewing tower crane. The W12000-450 rolled off the assembly line at the Intelligent Tower Crane Factory of Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology Co., Ltd. in Changde, Hunan Province, China. Zoomlion especially designed and built the model for the world’s largest road-rail cable-stayed bridge project, the Changzhou-Taizhou Yangtze River Bridge, integrating an expressway, ordinary highway, and inter-city railway. The W12000-450 weighs in at 4,000t, with a rated load moment of 12,000 tonnemetres. It’s the world’s first top-slewing tower crane, exceeding 10,000 tonnemetres, and has a maximum lifting weight of 450t and maximum lifting height of 400 metres, which is the equivalent of lifting 300 cars to a level of 130 floors in one lift.
The key technologies of building super-large tower cranes are complex, with high requirements for safety and reliability. Zoomlion has taken on the challenges of technological innovation and manufacturing requirements to venture into the unknown and set new records. “In the absence of structural patterns to follow, we re-established a calculation platform for structural rigidity, stability, and modal analysis,” said Tang Shaofang, vice president of Zoomlion and general manager of Zoomlion Construction Hoisting Machinery Company. “The W12000-450 tower crane has adopted several of Zoomlion’s selfdeveloped technologies, including full penetration T-joint welding technology, and conquered technical difficulties such as ultra-thick plate weld cracking, enabling the W12000-450 to not only achieve super
strong lifting performances reaching the 10,000-tonne-metre level, but also guarantee safety and reliability throughout the processes of transporting, assembly/ disassembly, and operation,” he said. The W12000-450 is produced in the world’s largest Intelligent Tower Crane Factory. According to plans, the factory will be manufacturing construction hoisting machinery products covering the range from 80 to 20,000 tonne-metres. It is fully digitalised to integrate big data analysis, industrial internet, information systems, visualisation, and more to achieve full-coverage networking and manmachine interaction. Through intelligent, flexible assembly tools, the W12000-450 was manufactured in four months, compared to traditional manufacturing technology that would take at least 12 months. According to Zoomlion, the recently released W12000450 is the world’s largest top-slewing tower crane.
100 / CAL March/April 2022
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