Coal import facilities in northern Europe have traditionally focused on grab cranes, mainly large gantry grab unloaders for high throughput applications, rather than continuous ship unloaders (CSUs) which operators in the Far East, such as Japan and South Korea, have adopted more enthusiastically. This may be a reflection of the number of private terminals for direct supply to steelworks on the continent, as well as the strong, domestic CSU manufacturing tradition
Grab crane technology covers a wide range of options and most of them are employed in one form or other by north European ports. Essentially the use of grab cranes falls into two main categories, although there is some “cross-over” - railmounted and “mobile” unloaders (essentially harbour mobile cranes) and floating cranes. There are of course hybrid designs, such as the Gottwald HSK crane supplied to a steelworks at Ghent which is mounted on a rail-mounted portal (incidentally, the HSK concept has proved popular in Russian ports such as Novorossiysk, but for different reasons). Also worth mentioning are the two lemniscate cranes fitted on a rail-mounted portal at Flushing Marine Terminals (FMT) in Vlssingen, as traditionally the lemniscate concept is associated with floating cranes....
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This complete item is approximately 2700 words in length, and appeared in the November/December 2003 issue of CoalTrans International, on page 28.
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