Professional Crane Audits: best to renovate old cranes

By admin April 18, 2013 9:24 am IST

Professional Crane Audits: best to renovate old cranes
Professional Crane Audits (PCA) solution from Demag helps improve the safety, reliability, performance, or ergonomics of 5 to 7-year-old cranes. Bill Shukla writes the importance of PCA and how it works.
Bill Shukla,Business Head -RefurbishmentTerex Material HandlingDemag Cranes and Components (I)
Frequently maintenance planners are faced with the dilemma; whether to recommend replacement of a current equipment, e.g. EOT cranes or to continue using the same with certain modifications, upgrades or repairs, which is what we term as refurbishment.
Only a study of key problem areas will lead one toward the right answer. A decision can also be made if one is aware of the primary objective or a motive for the change or related to safety (current crane is not safe), reliability (crane is unreliable and erratic in performance) or performance (more maintenance required, frequent failures, and higher power consumption).To support the universe of maintenance managers and to provide production heads a decision support mechanism, Demag introduces professional crane audits (PCA) under which provide:• Physical inspections based on objective measurements• Non destructive testing of welds and other critical components• Cycle time study and customer interviews• Thermography and oil sampling• Safe working period (SWP) analysis• Pictorial reports with time-based recommendations based on IS/ISO standards
At the heart of the PCA is the safe working period (SWP) analysis. Based on use, the auditors determine the actual number of cycles the crane structure has been subjected to at the respective load spectrum. The actual number of running hours for hoisting machinery, cross travel machinery and long travel machinery are other parameters that are recorded or calculated.This is then compared with original design class of the crane and estimated crane use as shared by the user over a defined time span in the future.