On 15 September Big Carl lifted a whopping 388 tonne pre-cast slab of concrete and rebar steel from the central pre-cast yard to the East Pool Bunker to be integrated into the unit 1 area.
To date, the mega machine has completed 301 lifts at Hinkley Point C, carrying anything from rebar cages to items of equipment. The second of these ‘liner rings’ included a total weight of 544 tonnes – although a significant proportion of that included Big Carl’s own lifting equipment a ring weight of 347 tonnes, a hook block weighing 58 tonnes, a novabeam of 72 tonnes and tackle and chains weighing 66 tonnes.Īnd, Daniels points out that there is far more work for Big Carl to do on site than that. These ‘significant’ lifts so far have included moving into position two of the three 47-metre wide prefabricated steel rings which will eventually form the first of two nuclear reactors on site. “It’s a massive benefit to have such a crane on the project with incredible capacities at massive radiuses.” “Big Carl undertakes the large significant lifts,” says Daniels. Named after Carl Sarens, the director of global operations and technical solutions at Belgian crane manufacturer Sarens, since he arrived on site in 2019, Big Carl, has received much of the site’s media attention. In fact, ‘Big Carl’ is such a beast that the machine is frequently referred to by the Hinkley Point team and main contractor BYLOR in anthropomorphic terms as ‘he’ rather than ‘it’. Big Carl’s main boom can be extended from 118 metres to 160 metres and its jib can be extended to 100 metres, giving him a maximum height of 250 metres, nearly as tall as the Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt.
But the giant lattice boom crane is also the tallest. Not only is ‘Big Carl’ the world’s strongest land-based crane, able to carry 5,000 tonnes in a single lift, according to manufacturer Sarens.
0 kommentar(er)
