Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

The article below was taken from the Mace news page, and again I thought it was quite interesting!!  I’m hoping I don’t miss the mark again Joe!  Nothing like a bit of crane ‘appreciation’ top trumps!!!

How to build the world’s largest crane

Faced with building the biggest observation wheel in the world, the Dubai-I team is no stranger to challenges or to beating records. And this month was no exception with the delivery and erection of the Mammoet Platform, Twin ring Containerised (PTC) 200DS, the world’s biggest crane.

The PTC 200DS was designed and built by Mammoet in Holland and has spent the last two years in Texas working at an offshore oil assembly depot lifting a 120m spar as part of a deep sea drilling platform. It was disassembled in April 2014 returned to Holland, cleaned, maintained and thoroughly inspected prior to travelling the 6000 plus nautical miles to the UAE Port of Jebel Ali.

To transport the huge crane the 221 containers had to be offloaded and then placed onto articulated vehicles where they were then transported by road to the Bluewaters Island site in Dubai. They were then offloaded by one of the three crawler cranes and laid out in order of erection sequence by the site based team of trained Mammoet erection specialists. The crane is so large that the operation required one LR1600 crawler crane @ 600Te capacity, two No 250 tonne and one 180 tonne crawler crane sited in the unloading and distribution area.

During the erection there have been several critical lifts, in some instances three of the four crawler cranes were used to carry out a single lift. The critical lifts have been impressive and professionally executed by the Mammoet erection team. The most demanding of these was the lifting of the back mast from horizontal to 70 metres with all cranes travelling 60 metres in unison whilst lifting a load of 340Te.

Senior Project Manager Piers Sidey said: “The fact that this will be the largest observation wheel in the world by some margin presents huge challenges on several fronts. The designers are pushing the boundaries to find effective and economic solutions. When you double in height the forces, stresses and deflections are magnified many more times. Secondly since we need to maximise off-site assembly as far as possible the wheel will be delivered in very large pre-assembled sections up to 118 metres long and 1800 tonnes in weight. Hence the need for one of the biggest cranes in the world.”

The Mammoet PTC in numbers:
221 containers required to transport PTC200DS
3,400 tonne lifting capacity
830 tonne – weight of Dubai-I leg
1,800 tonne – weight of Dubai-I spindle and hub which will be single lift at over 100m high
123 metres – length of boom
55 metres – length of jib
182 metres – total height at tip of jib
87 Te – weight of hook block
123 metres and 415 tonne – heaviest lift during construction by three cranes

Here is a pdf with some more info of the process of DubaiI crane process.