Coupling specialist Malmedie is of-fering a digital solution to increase safety by remotely monitoring the wear on rope drum coupling connections.
“Traditionally, assessing wear on rope drum coupling connections re-quires visual or tactile inspections, of-ten conducted in hard-to-reach areas,” Malmedie said. “Accessing the hoist unit can be lengthy and hazardous, necessitating the shutdown of both equipment and crane. This extensive monitoring process negatively impacts productivity and consumes val-uable time from skilled personnel.”
Furthermore, detecting and accu-rately measuring wear becomes more difficult as components approach the end of their service life. “Accurately reading wear measurements with a precision of 1mm is already difficult, and with wear rates as low as tenths of a millimetre per year, ensuring full utilisation of the component’s lifespan is nearly impossible,” Malmedie said.
Up to eight sensors
Malmedie’s LifeMonitor technologysolves this problem through continu-ous wear monitoring, enabling precise measurement of the remaining wear reserve. “Based on the linear wear be-haviour of barrel couplings – unlike gear couplings, which exhibit differ-ent patterns – LifeMonitor technology can accurately predict the remainingservice life of the rope drum coupling. This makes LifeMonitor an essential component for predictive and condi-tion-based maintenance. By accurate-ly determining wear and wear rate, operators can efficiently schedule replacement intervals with minimal effort,” Malmedie said.
Up to eight sensors can be connected to a single LifeMonitor unit, which Ma-medie says makes the system ideal for demanding applications such as STS cranes and ship unloaders. Rope drum couplings can be monitored in one or two load directions. Furthermore, the wear condition of multiple systems can be centrally recorded and analysed, allowing early detection of misalignment in the drivetrain, which impacts the lifespan of barrel couplings and helps prevent unexpected downtime.
On the cranes at Tollerort
LifeMonitor technology has been in- stalled to monitor and analyse two barrel couplings on an STS crane at Container Terminal Tollerort, operated by Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG.
Figure 1 shows that, before realign-ing the drivetrain, coupling 1 (left) exhibited a wear rate of approximately 8mm per year, equating to a one-year service life. After realignment in April, this value significantly improved to 0.42mm per year, which was immedi-ately detected by the LifeMonitor sys-tem and translated into an expected remaining service life of five years.
For coupling 2 (right), the post-align-ment wear rate was determined to be 0.5mm per year, translating to an operational lifespan of approximate-ly 20 years in a new Malmedie barrel coupling or four years of remaining service life.
“Continuous wear monitoring with an accuracy of up to 0.1mm sets new standards in monitoring rope drum couplings,” Malmedie said. “It not only provides precise and reliable measure-ments but also enables early detection of unexpected wear conditions and the proactive planning of necessary maintenance measures. This mini-mises downtime, reduces operating costs, and extends the service life of critical components – marking a sig-nificant step towards future-proof digitalisation in crane operations.”
Source: WCN JUNE, Page 7
