The balance crane principle is simple. The “E” in E-Crane stands for equilibrium, a key feature of the parallelogram style boom which provides a direct mechanical link between the stick and the rear counterweight. There are no steel winches or cables in the design. The counterweight continuously balances the total weight of the steel structure along with half of the operational load. As the lifting radius is varied, the change in the load moment is automatically equalised by the moving counterweight. With traditional hoisting machinery, the payload, working tool, and steel construction all have to be lifted, but the E-Crane’s balance compensates for all but half of the payload. Compared to conventional cranes that require as much as 80% of their available energy just to move the boom, stick, and grab, the balanced crane puts gravity to work, reducing horsepower requirements and power consumption by up to 50% and significantly reducing maintenance and operating costs.

This superior balance permits mounting on virtually any type of barge, and according to the manufacturer, even ones without spud poles. There are many benefits, one of which is that the balanced nature helps to minimise tipping when fully loaded. This means less barge movement which results in less friction between the floating terminal and the vessel and more precise and faster grab positioning. There are numerous examples of E-Cranes installed on barges or pontoons, but we will only highlight three of them; Albatros, Seaboard Midema, and Titan.

Albatros by Herbosch-Kiere

Back in 2009, Herbosch-Kiere (part of the group Eiffage) put a new dredger into operation, called the Albatros. The Albatros is a self-propelled spud barge with a 1500B Series E-Dredger installed on it. It has a 29m horizontal reach, 15 Mton lift capacity and an 18m dredging depth. It’s immensely flexible, as the crew only has to raise the spuds and start the engines. There is no need to wait for a tow. The Albatros puts balance to the test day after day. According to the crane operator, even after raising the spud poles at the dredging job and lifting a fully loaded 5.5m³ clamshell bucket to an extended position of 27m outreach above the water, the pontoon tilted by only 20cm. The spud poles are only needed to keep the barge in position in tidal waters.

The crane operator also states that the machine is “amazingly quiet.” This can be useful when working closer to shore and near residential areas. The Albatros is also a “green machine”, operating on a 225kW electric motor, harnessed from the engine used to propel the barge. This means costs for diesel can be kept to a minimum.

The Albatros has worked on projects in the port of Ostend in Belgium, Rotterdam and London. At the time of writing, the Albatros is being put into service preparing the seabed for wind turbines in the Swedish part of the Baltic Sea, in close vicinity of the city Kårehamn.

Before arrival of the wind turbine foundations, the seabed needs to provide a perfectly flat surface. Firstly, 0.5m of the seabed will be removed by the Albatros to provide a solid surface and remove all large boulders. The Albatros has enough power to excavate the hard seabed, creating a perfectly horizontal surface. After the foundations have been installed, they will be ballasted to be able to withstand the powers of the sea and the wind turbine itself.

 In a preliminary phase, the shafts of the foundations are filled with crude iron ore, which is cast via a funnel using a cable crane. In the next stage, the other compartments are filled with crude iron ore. A layer of heavy quarrystone is then placed on top. To prevent the gravel layer from being washed away, the Albatros will install a quarrystone anti-scour layer out of rubble around the foundations.

Seaboard’s Midema grain terminal in DRC

Another notable floating E-Crane project is the one for Seaboard’s Midema grain terminal in Matadi, Democratic Republic of Congo. Matadi is the furthest inland harbour on the Congo River, and just like many other ports in Africa, there are major port congestion problems. This, combined with the lack of new and reliable dock side equipment, was a major bottleneck in Midema’s grain supply chain.

Back in 2008, Seaboard opted for a 1000m² floating terminal for their new material handling equipment. It is equipped with a 1500 Series E-Crane with an outreach of 35.9m, lift capacity of 13.5 Mton and a 400 Mton per hour unloading capacity. This floating system can unload up to Handymax sized vessels for ship-to-quay or ship-to-ship trans-loading. The crane transfers grain from the ship into two hoppers, and a conveyor transports the grain directly to the silos.

The terminal, called Mama Mobokoli (“caring mother” in one of the local dialects), is a self-sustaining platform complete with electric genset. However, the system can be attached to shore power through a built-in switch gear. It also came equipped with a winching system that allows the platform to shuttle alongside the ship for full access to each of the ship’s holds.

The entire platform was erected and tested at the port of Zeebrugge in Belgium, making for a quick and easy installation of the system on-site at the port. From there, a dedicated tow transported the whole platform to its final destination in the DRC where unloading could begin immediately; a big advantage for Seaboard since the logistics of local marine construction would have been very difficult and costly. This journey only took 40 days. Also, the DRC can sometimes be politically unstable. An additional advantage of the floating terminal is that it can be detached from the shore, to travel away from possible vandalisms during these hard times.

New dredging unit: Titan

Remember the “extreme machine” Blockbuster in the port of Rotterdam? This state-of-the-art machine is a heavily modified E-Crane with an outreach of 63m and a lifting capacity of 50 Mton. This monstrous machine has a height of 30m and tips the scales at 1200 Mtons.

The original contractor, PUMA, used the machine from 2011 through 2012 for the construction of a stone dune at the Port of Rotterdam, an important part of the hard sea defense which will protect Maasvlakte 2 from the sea and from extreme “10,000 year” storms. The Blockbuster placed approximately 20,000 individual large concrete blocks into the hard sea defense of Maasvlakte 2. Each block is 2.5 x 2.5 x 2.5 meters and weighs more than 40 Mton. In January 2012, the Blockbuster’s work at the hard sea defense was complete.

However, the Blockbuster will not die a silent death, as it is about to get a second life in the Caspian Sea. The Blockbuster will be renamed, “Titan”. At the time of writing, the Blockbuster is being disassembled and sent back to E-Crane’s workshop for modifications to fit its next job. The cylinders, each weighing about 4 tonnes, have already been removed. Disassembling the counterweight and catwalk platforms will be the next step.

The upper part of the Blockbuster will soon start a new journey on a pontoon for SAIPEM, an Italian company and international contractor in oil and gas. The Titan will be used for a dredging operation in the Caspian Sea, close to the shores of Kazakhstan, where pipeline is going to be installed. The Titan will dig a trench where the pipeline is to be placed. Using the Titan allows the mud/dirt to be stored underwater in a stockpile along the trench enough distance away to ensure that the material will not migrate back into the trench. This saves SAIPEM time and money because they will not require transport vessels to store the material while the pipeline is being placed. Once the pipe is installed, the Titan will reclaim the mud/dirt from the underwater stockpile and cover the pipe. The Titan brings a combination of outreach (45 m) and lifting capacity (24,5 Mton) never before achieved by conventional dredgers.

 Perfectly balanced floating terminals on the rise

These noteworthy projects are just a few of the examples of
how the balance principle passes practical tests in the field. Ports and terminal operators are continuously realising the advantages of such a system. Kinder Morgan recently purchased a brand new 1000 Series E-Crane mounted on a custom barge, for cleaning coal barges at their terminal in New Orleans, USA. A new balanced material handler will also be installed onto a floating terminal in the port of Kazan for the Russian company, Volga Shipping. It will be used for gravel and sand unloading.

There will definitely be an increase in floating terminals over the next couple of years as more and more terminal operators become aware of the benefits of the floating bulk handling equipment. They provide unique benefits that fixed dockside equipment cannot: they are extremely flexible and even self-sustainable. They can easily be detached from the shore when necessary, to avoid congested ports and damage due to severe storms. Combining the benefits of the balance principle and floating terminals makes very cost effective material handling equipment that’s adaptable to any situation. It’s the ideal solution to replace outdated equipment, and even when no land is available, you can expand your operations onto the water and further increase efficiency of your terminal

On April 26, 1956, an aging vessel named the Ideal X, berthed in the port of Newark, loaded with 58 containers. It reached the port of Houston five days later where a long queue of trucks waited to haul the containers to their destination. The advantages of transporting freight in an unglamorous box were soon acknowledged and resulted in other technical innovations in the wider port logistical field. Keith Tantlinger filed no less than 12 patents all linked to various artefacts ranging from container design refinements to cranes and spreaders, thus a system called containerisation was born. According to Marc Levinson, (author of The Box –  How the container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger) this not only marks the genesis of containerisation as an integrated system, but the start of a silent revolution in international trade. The diffusion of this technology rapidly produced sizable macro-economic effects which spurred international trade and connected fragmented markets, similar to the effect of railroads for national markets in the nineteenth century. Today, it is estimated that around 350 million containers are at use globally.

The constant increase in the global volume of trade in containerised form exerts increasing pressure on ports and port logistics. As a result, port container terminals find themselves buckled by pressures of efficiency and the inability to respond to the demands of the dynamic world of seaborne trade. Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) reflect the automation processes that have been adopted by large ports such as Dusseldorf and Rotterdam as a response to this pressure. These unmanned transport vehicles have proved their ability to improve traffic management and have evolved in their operational efficiency. However, this response remains insufficient and infeasible for different port sizes. Insufficient because the routing of containers must follow fixed routes based on embedded transponders in the infrastructure, making it difficult to achieve productivity gains in small to medium ports; infeasible because such infrastructure requires huge investments which these ports cannot afford.

The European commission points to the urgent need to make small to medium ports and their adjacent urban towns more competitive by acknowledging both the impact and benefits of modern technologies on socio-economic development. In its ‘Freight Transport Logistics Action Plan’ [COM (2007) 607] the European Commission contends that “the deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) which help better manage infrastructure and transport operations is slow”. Such systems can contribute substantially to cleaner and safer operations. A recent legal framework (Directive 2010/40/EU) was adopted in 2010 to speed up the dissemination and use of these innovative transport technologies across Europe.

In this context, InTraDE (Intelligent Transportation for Dynamic Environment) project, co-funded by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Interreg IVB NWE (North West Europe region) programme represents a hi-tech solution that fits the legal framework directive of the EU. Its aim is to develop an innovative means of transport that is intelligent, autonomous, clean and modular in architecture (i.e. Intelligent Autonomous Vehicle – IAV) but also to develop a new approach to handle congestion and space utilisation in ports and confined spaces. Adopting the IAV concept for the conveyance of different types of freight is a feature that is both appealing and feasible for future application in small and medium size ports, thus improving their competitiveness through enhanced efficiency.

InTraDE achieved the following objectives through a transnational collaboration with its partners:

(1) conducted studies on traffic flow within confined spaces of container terminals and identified the factors influencing the overall productivity of such facilities; investigated existing traffic control methods and developed new methods to improve efficiency whilst ensuring safety;

(2) identified automatic navigation methods and developed new algorithms for robust supervision, and investigated practical issues in implementing an automatic navigation system in container terminals;

(3) developed an automatic traffic time-domain simulator for autonomous and manned vehicles to carried out a design case study of terminal layout using simulation tools;

(4) designed, tested and validated an IAV prototype inside port terminals in the NWE region and combined urban-confined spaces.

The developed electrically powered IAV prototype, the supervision platform and the virtual simulator together form an integrated ITS, thus representing a technological innovation which will benefit from the availability of small to medium ports of the NWE region as initial test zones. The ports of Le Havre, Rouen-Radicatel, Dublin and Oostende contribute significantly to the preparation of this action.  The objective is to assess the transferability of this novel technology and its viable impacts from operational, social and economic perspectives. According to Professor Rochdi Merzouki the scientist responsible for the inception of InTraDE in Université de Lille 1, “the forthcoming port pilot tests will allow the InTraDE team to draw a full assessment of the functionality and viability of the IAV and demonstrate its superiority to AGVs.” The results of the pilot tests will help improve the technological specifications of the ITS and assess the possibilities of its adoption for multi-modal transport systems.

The newly developed ITS offers the possibility to tackle future challenges such as congestion, and CO2 pollution reductions, while adressing the limits associated with existing transport infrastructure, in particular AGVs. Such limits are associated with pollution from their diesel engines, the cost of setting the infrastructure for their operation, and the way they utilise space, since they can only follow predetermined routes. The aggregate effects of these  limits  translate into a reduction in productivity and competitivity. An AGV is designed to work in a controlled environment separate from manned operations (see table 1 for a detailed comparison), whereas the IAV can be viewed as a “field robot.” It is an “over-actuated” vehicle which uses multiple sensors for control and navigation allowing it to function in various environments.

With a hybrid drive option (automatic and manned) and battery power, the InTraDE IAV named “RobuTainer” is able to navigate remotely. It can operate unmanned without rails or ground infrastructure. This makes it environmentally effective and extremely flexible highlighting yet another advantage over the diesel powered AGV. Notwithstanding the fact that the use of diesel powered AGVs and reach stackers for the handling and routing of containers is responsible for significant pollution outputs not only in port environments but also in their adjacent urban areas.

The development of the IAV-based ITS system is founded on the unification of three research themes. The first concerns the design of an IAV prototype from a purely technical point of view, and the definition of its components for hardware architecture while ensuring functional reliability, dependability, diagnosis and maintainability of the system, not to forget its flexibility since it is able to move in all directions thanks to its modular architecture and omni-directional steering system which provide three degrees of freedom: longitudinal, lateral and yaw.

The second theme is the supervision system which monitors the vehicle’s movements in real time, using data acquired from its onboard sensors. GPS, Wi-Fi, radio, laser telemeters and odometers links allow the identification of the position, trajectory and functional condition of each IAV. Thus, the trajectory of the IAV can always be compared with the real-time plan and the monitoring system will cover different tasks, namely the preparation of miss
ions, real-time monitoring of movements and, of course, data management of the vehicle.

In addition, the simulation platform is used in conjunction with the various possibilities offered by the “RobuTainer” as a simulation tool for different scenarios in port areas. Therefore, it becomes imperative to determine the operations that achieve the best efficiencies and productivity gains, but also to quantify the optimal number of logistical elements such as cranes, number of IAVs, tables (or cassettes) and to optimise their use in terms of time, calculation of optimal trajectory in normal, degraded and faulty situations, space management…etc.

In this context, the idea of ??using tables (cassettes) to ensure flexibility and adaptability in the transport of containers allows the exploitation of “RobuTainer” in different ways, but raises a new issue. Indeed, the study of the number of IAVs, the number of cassettes, and the use of a train of IAVs (platooning) offers yet an additional advantage over the AGV. IAVs can follow each other like a train without being coupled physically, and are able to continue their mission towards a given destination even in the case of an IAV’s system fault in the platoon. This makes it possible for an IAV to reconfigure itself and continue operation in a degraded mode. A similar scenario with the AGV system is not only infeasible but can lead to a complete halt.

It was important to develop, implement and validate algorithms for supervision and diagnosis of IAVs, thus providing the means to ensure their functional reconfiguration in the case of faults, but also to be able to define the different modes of operation. Indeed, a supervision system expressing the state of an IAV should be considered by a given operator in terms of available functional possibilities and services; hence, the importance of combining functional and behavioral approaches to define the various operating modes through “fault detection and isolation” (FDI), and this represents the third theme of the project making it yet another qualifying advantage over the AGV system.