Mammoet Tandem Crane Lifts for the Ain Dubai

Information on tandem crane lifts normally gets added to my tandem lift notes. But this lift strikes me as worthy of its own notes. Lifting the 1,805 spindle from a barge to a height of 137m set a world record as the heaviest and highest tandem lift. [mammoet]

Two of three photos posted by Mammoet with the comment:

The wait is over! Ain Dubai, the world’s tallest and largest observation wheel is opening tomorrow! Nearly twice the height of the London Eye, the magnificent #AinDubai is the result of a fantastic engineering by all the teams involved.

Some facts: 

- The assembled hub and spindle is approximately 40m long and 20m high and weighs a massive 1,805t – which is equivalent to four A380 aircrafts

- Each leg of the wheel stands at a height of 126m and is long enough to fit 15 London buses

- The structure includes around 11,200t of steel, around 33 percent more than the amount of iron used to construct the iconic Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Learn more about the project here: https://mmoet.me/3kmZptg

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The ring crane used for the near end of the spindle was the world's biggest crane, PTC 200-DS. The crawler crane used for the far end was rated at 3000t.. [mammoet] (I'm disappointed that they did not provide the model of the crawler crane.) It appears that the crawler crane not only had to lift its load, but it had to travel with it from close to the barge to near the two legs furthest from the barge. The ring "just" had to turn. I put "just" in quotes because it would have to constantly adjust it radius and rate of rotation to keep the tip of the boom directly above the lift point of the spindle. Any deviation would introduce lateral forces on the booms. Booms cannot take a lot of lateral force

Each 890t, 126m long leg was also a tandem lift. We can see from this photo that they must have rebuilt the ring crane at least three times. Once on the right side to lift the first two legs. Then again in the position of this photo. And then again back on the right side to help with the spindle lift.

mammoet

600t and 400t crawler cranes were used to do tandem lifts to remove the eight temporary spokes. Each spoke was 112m long and weighed 470t.

mammoet

Maarten Sitebeheer posted
[Fortunately, the ringer crane and legs are distinctive enough that I recognized what was being built because there were no comments.]

Ng Weiliang posted
Lr13000 and ptc