OT: Strangest bridge crane I've seen

[winchman]

Screen capture from Space's Deepest Secrets show showing Xenon experiment on dark matter:



A wider view of the underground chamber with the crane in the far left background of this Google image:



It's a novel way to be able to use the entire volume of the space.

[boslab]

That's the prettiest gantry I've ever seen, awesome, saw one that goes round in circles, not pretty like that, seems obvious an arch, normal bridge cranes have to have positive Camber to counter deflection, the inspectors tend to condem cranes that have gone negative, rightly so, but an arch is super strong, think it needs 3 point failing in bridges, from memory
Mark

[flylo]

Can I have one? Please, Please

[lugnut]

The operator would really have to be on his toes when moving from one side to the other because the hook or load would be either going up or down. But then that motion could be programed into it to compensate for that???

[wierdscience]

Well that sure is different,I wonder what the mechanism to traverse the hoist looks like?

[754]

Gear, or gears, and curved rack, probably top and bottom....my guess.
And pricey..

[JoeCB]

I don't believe it... I think that we have an optical allusion resulting from the use of a "fish" eye" camera lens. No one, not even a stupid wasteful government entity would design and build a crane like that ( I hope!!!)

Joe B

[TGTool]

I wondered about the fisheye distortion as well, but a couple things seem to dismiss it. The lettering on the crane is straight, and in the second photo you can see both a straight and a curved item.

[winchman]

Here's another Google image. Definitely not an illusion.



I imagine it's got a rack and pinion drive on the trolley similar to a cogged railway.

[Forrest Addy]

That bridge crane with the arced girders (it's a bridge crane not a gantry) seems to me an engineer's worse challenge. 40 tons? How much do the bridge trucks spread under load? What a nightmare to design and certify. And how do they service it within inches of the vaulted ceiling?

Rack and pinion trolley drive on both sides of the bridge, I suppose, but any movement of the trolley forces a lift or descent of the load whose tangential component restrained by the rack and trolley drive along the arc is a sine function of the load and the trolley's angular position. All load raising and lowering apparatus is required to have a load brake so the load cannot take charge if some problem emerged with the trolley motor, its brake, or electrics.

Two-way/reversing load brake? How they do that?

How do they train the operators?

That arc-wise trolley motion is interesting as hell as an abstract problem and the whole installation is very handsomely executed. Great extra credit problem for a 400 level ME class. However I would not like to be the engineer to design the nightmare nor the test guy to put it through its paces.

[754]

If you think that is challenging, try building a dark matter Xenon experiment test rig...

[ikdor]

I don't understand all the hubub about this crane. Yes, it's unusual but it's not much of an engineering challenge and money is no object.
If you want to be amazed you only need to take a look at your car in more detail. Millions of engineering hours went into designing that.

Igor

[Joe Rogers]

I don't understand all the hubub about this crane. Yes, it's unusual but it's not much of an engineering challenge and money is no object.
If you want to be amazed you only need to take a look at your car in more detail. Millions of engineering hours went into designing that.

Igor

Now if they only took another couple of hours and made the oil filters accessable and not have to remove the windshield to do a heater core...
Joe

[boslab]

Oh iky, that's so cynical, it's the prettiest bridge crane in the world, I love it, I do not love my car, millions of hours wasted on automatic parking, designing a machine you can't even fix, your not allowed to, VW make **** cars, you aren't going to ever see a 100 year old Tiguan in the future, the electronic systems would have self destructed after the preset timer hidden away in a secret register deep in the heart of the ECU, however that crane could easily last 100 years.
Mark

[alanganes]

OT: Strangest bridge crane I've seen

I would have to think that the motion needed to maintain the height position of the load when traversing the arched bridge would be programmed into the controls. Computing power is cheap these days and computers are good at that sort of stuff. Surely not a trivial problem, but not crazy difficult either. I expect Marv Klotz will have a DOS routine up on his website to solve this by lunchtime today.