Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header
Content archived on 2022-11-21

Ergonomic design of an integrated system for monitoring the state of repair of steelworks cranes, in order to improve safety by reducing the burden on crane drivers and maintenance staff

Exploitable results

The crane monitoring system 'KRANOMAT' has been developed and installed on a mill crane. KRANOMAT carries out the continuous on-line supervision of essential measured data from the plant to recognise dangerous situations and to relieve the crane operators from supervision tasks. Also, long term analyses of deterioration of important crane components are carried out to relieve the maintenance. For the pilot installation a slewing portal crane has been chosen which is used for iron ore unloading. The crane monitoring system consists of three components from which two are installed on the crane itself and the third one in a ground station. The mobile components are used for logging and pre-processing of relevant measuring signals and additional data from the field. The output of derived warnings to the crane operator in the case of actual break-down and dangerous situations is up to now only prepared as an option as requested by the mill authority. In the ground station the logged data are stored and more extensive data processing is carried out for relief of the maintenance staff. The forecast of the expected readiness for use and actual condition of the plant are evaluated from previous data analysis. A prerequisite for the use of the crane monitoring system is an interface with the system of computer-aided planning and controlling of maintenance. An essential part of the ground station is a workstation for analysing purposes where the existing information can be evaluated. Important warnings must be given by the monitoring system to the operator in a suitable manner without excessive information which will distract the operator from the observation of crane position and lifting load. The requirements on the user interface at the ground station are somewhat different. There the whole sample of existing measured data and additional information's must be available for a clearly arranged evaluation by which automatic procedures are used as well as interactive tools. The development of the crane monitoring system (hardware and software) including laboratory tests and installation in the field had been carried out.

Searching for OpenAIRE data...

There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE

No results available