View A Video on Lifting Cranes - A Quick Introduction
Lifting Cranes
Lifting cranes are used by the construction, engineering, manufacturing and transportation industries, and they can be designed in mobile as well as free-standing and structurally-mounted stationary configurations. Lifting cranes run on hydrocarbon-based fuel, hydraulic or electric battery power. There are several different varieties of lifting cranes, all of which are customized based on the demands of their specific applications Each have varying load capacities, sizes, lifting heights and spans and are mounted on automated vehicles or stationary supports. The areas they work in can be indoors, on or near roads, over rough and uneven terrain, on railroads, over bodies of water and even in the air. Rough terrain cranes are used to move logs in logging applications, cranes can be positioned over waterways for loading ships and some helicopters are specially designed to serve as cranes that move materials to and from hard-to-reach areas.
Crane manufacturers have responded to the varied needs of industry with an extensive variety of crane configurations. There are many cases in which cranes are required to be mobile. In construction applications, cranes can be mounted permanently on vehicles, like in the case of mobile jib cranes used in home construction, or they can be disassembled and placed on trucks for transportation to construction sites. Other mobile crane examples include railroad cranes, which can be mounted near railroad tracks for the easy loading and unloading of rail-mounted cargo; floating cranes are also mobile and are mounted on boats and even floating platforms for the unloading of ships under unusual circumstances. Fixed cranes are generally characterized by greater stability than mobile cranes. Some cranes can be considered cross-overs; tower cranes, for example, can be disassembled and moved from one site to another, but while in use they are mounted on 400,000 pound concrete slabs and cannot be moved without major disassembly efforts. Other permanent fixed cranes include
workstation cranes,
stacker cranes and gantry cranes, all of which vary in terms of their sizes and applications. Effective industrial operations that make use of cranes always make ample consideration for proper crane maintenance and operation; lifting crane failure can result in worker injury and product loss.
