Safety Factor: How To Make Your Overhead Crane More Efficient

Intro

(rock instrumental plays)

– [Voice Over] For your own safety, you are reminded to stand behind the yellow line.

– [Ben Hengst] Welcome to Safety Factor. We’re back with Steven Lubeck, president of Laser View Technologies and Mark Shubel from Mazzella to talk a bit more about smart non-contact measurement solutions. Last time we sat down with Mark and Steve, we discussed how smart non-contact measurement solutions can make your overhead crane safer. Today we are discussing how they can increase productivity and make your overhead crane more efficient. Guys, thanks for joining. Welcome back to the channel. You’ll have to excuse my voice, I’ve got a bit of a cold.

What effects can the different types of smart non-contact measurement solutions have on productivity?

– [Ben Hengst] So let’s jump right into it. Let’s talk about the different types of smart non-contact measurement solutions and what effect they can have on productivity and how they can make you more efficient.

– [Mark Shubel] Sure. I guess if I could, I’d like to start out. I really like the idea of, you know, this technology and that it helps to create a safe, efficient load pathway for the operators. And that in essence means less start stops and, you know, moves, so it increases efficiency. Also, the other thing that I see that it does, which is very useful is that it minimizes damage to both product, the overhead cranes themselves, the machinery that’s, you know, they may be working around as well as the buildings, which also certainly add to the uptime of an overall manufacturing facility’s production. So there’s a lot of benefits to doing this and it, like I said, it’s more than just the simple things that, you know, it’s going to make the operator safer, which is, you know, the underlying need if you will and the driving force behind all of this. But in addition to that, there’s a lot of peripheral things that this benefits, you know, the company that invest in this product. So I’m really excited about it.

– [Steven Lubeck] Yeah, so when people, when we’re talking about this, the non-contact measurement solutions, in my mind we’re talking about exactly what Mark said. The combination of like no-fly zone, anti-collision, side load detection, and the combination of all of them together and each on its own adds a piece to it. So the no-fly zones let the operator not worry about what he could hit instead of watching where he wants to go and does not worry about getting too close to the press, too close to a machine, too close to another load. But the combination of no-fly zone with the anti-collision is now he doesn’t have to worry about the colliding between the two cranes. He can concentrate what he is doing. Now if you add side loader or side pull detection, people call it different things. But if he accidentally does not have it perfectly centered and he thought he had it perfectly centered, we would not let him lift and he would have to move and adjust a bridge in a trolley. So the combination of the three of those items really does help with productivity because now you’re worried about the task at hand and they’re not as much worried about every little bit of things that create an unsafe condition. So he can concentrate what he is trying to do. There’s different ways this can be integrated and in addition to just different ways of being integrated, there’s different degrees to which you can apply them.

How can no-fly zones improve productivity?

– [Steven Lubeck] So a no-fly zone, for example, can be used not only to protect from hitting a piece of equipment, swinging a load into a piece of equipment, it can be also used to stop your bridge and trolley exactly where you want to stop your bridge and trolley. So if you have a very consistent stopping distance, Mark, I’ve seen it where customers at stamping plants, they’ve used that so the operators don’t have to guess how far to move the dyes in towards the bolster. They can actually go in slow and then let us stop. But it’s important that they have a consistent stopping distance, you know, and that’s the drive and the other things about it that affect that. And we’re going to be talking to about that a little bit when we talk about sway anyway, with sway kind of makes its way into that same topic of stopping distance.

– [Mark Shubel] I agree wholeheartedly with you, Steve. And in essence what happens is the operator, because of the technology, gets trained in an efficient pathway and he starts to understand, you know, really how to do his job a lot more efficiently and, as I mentioned, there’s a lot less equipment damage, you know, to the crane, to the building itself, and to any of the equipment that’s in the manufacturing process.

How can side pull detection improve productivity?

– [Steven Lubeck] So when we’re talking about side pull, one of the things with side pull that we haven’t talked about is that there are mechanisms so that you can have the crane either tell the operator what direction to move the bridge and the trolley so that he does center it up. It’s a centering aid or there are also systems that do automatic centering and the automatic centering will center the load automatically if it’s not centered by moving the bridge and trolley and creeping the bridge and trolley and trying to lift, creep it, try to lift, creep it, and try to lift again. By doing that, the operator has to jog the crane less to move it to position. He can let the crane do its thing. If the operator decides not to use the automatic centering or if it’s not equipped on that particular crane, the feature that turns a red light on in the direction that the crane does not, cannot move, bridge or trolley, will tell the operator what direction to try not to move in. So now he can look up at four lights underneath of the girder and he can look at the ones that are green, and the ones that are red so he can see what direction he needs to move his bridge or trolley to center his load and we call it centered. So that right there takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. He’ll know that he has a clear lift and can continue doing it instead of making as many lifts to try to get it right. And we’ve done that in stamping plants and the combination of the two seem to be pretty productive.

– [Ben Hengst] So why wouldn’t you want your payload to sway besides the obvious of the fact that it’s dangerous? What else can happen if your payload is swaying even just a little bit?

– [Mark Shubel] There’s a lot of things to answer your question, Ben, when you have, you know, a suspended load like that and you have a true non-vertical pick like that and you’re getting some sway, what happens to the structure itself? Basically everything gets touched by it because of that sway because you get kind of a pendulum effect. So for instance, that sway translates up into the hoist trolley unit, which you know, affects the hoist trolley, running gear, all the different connections in it because it’s trying to move it back and forth if you will. It also does the same thing to the girders and the end truck connections on the crane. It also translates down into the wheels and axles on the crane, which in turn transfer down into the, you know, the ball rail and the building runway, which goes into the building structure itself. So not only are you having an unsafe situation where an operator can be trapped between a load and a piece of equipment for instance, and it swings towards him and pins him, but also everything mechanically as well as electrically is affected up above too every time that happens. So like I said, you get a pendulum effect. The crane in essence tries to rock back and forth and again, we’re always picking up a fairly heavy load, that’s what cranes are for. So it’s not like we’ve got, you know, a tennis ball. We’re talking about, you know, tens of thousands of pounds swinging on a cable, 30, 40, 50 feet in the air and then all of that force and momentum translating back up through the structures and all the mechanisms. So that’s from a service standpoint, I guess, as those are some of the things that I like that this product, you know, resolves those issues.

– [Steven Lubeck] Yeah, so people oftentimes confuse,

How are sway and side pull different?

– [Steven Lubeck] I found, Mark, that people confuse sway and side pull because they say, well, sway is swaying, side pull makes, you know, side pull can correct for sway. And the two, although related are actually very different, right? So the side pull is, I’m physically not doing a vertical pick. I’m off at an angle. Sway is I pick it up, I start moving, and as I start moving with my bridge, you have acceleration and then the acceleration starts to pendulum effect. But how they’re related is where if you do not have typically a vertical pick and you try to do sway control, you keep that un-vertical, that non-vertical pick in your move. So you never correct for that vertical pick, it tries to, it’s going to at least, it’s never going to fully get make that a vertical. Obviously gravity will make it vertical eventually, but the point is to do a good sway control, you need a vertical pick and the vertical pick is where the side pull detection comes in. So people oftentimes confuse the two together because when you do a non vertical pick and you pick up a coil and it swings, well that’s sway. But it’s really the term “sway” is really once you start getting moving with the bridge or the trolley and usually the bridge is what gives you most of the sway because your bridge is your faster moving, faster acceleration of the two between the bridge and the trolley. I guess in some places trolley can be fairly fast, but the bridge is usually the faster moving part of the crane. So it’s very important to have a vertical pick before you even want to approach sway control.

How can sway control improve productivity?

– [Steven Lubeck] And the thing about sway control and productivity as part of this piece is that if you have better control over your crane, even for a relatively inexperienced operator, he’ll get his tasks done quicker, he’ll get to position quicker, he won’t have to stop and wait and let it come to a steady state then move. And traditionally, I think we touched on this in the last episode is that the way people will deal with sway control traditionally is something called pitch and catch. So in other words, the load is already lifted, they’re moving the bridge. Now what’ll happen is that he’ll see his load swinging, he’ll let off the speed on the joystick and he’ll wait for the load to steady a little bit and then he’ll start on it again. He gives it time to come to steady state and starts moving again. So the acceleration has been canceled out and good operators know how to pitch and catch a load on a crane. That takes some time to do. And I’ve seen people do it, but I’ve seen people not know how to do it, myself included when I’ve tried to test out a crane.

– [Mark Shubel] And that also depends on what you’re doing. For instance, if you’re, like Steve’s mentioning, if you’re going down a long length of the runway, that doesn’t work real well when you’re in a tight situation. So again, it comes back to making sure

Why is a true vertical lift so important?

– [Mark Shubel] you have this true vertical lift as possible every time. Really. I mean truly that’s the underlying thing we shoot for. Wouldn’t you agree, Steve?

– [Steven Lubeck] I would and we’ve been talking about the true vertical lift just so you don’t hit a piece of equipment or swing a dye and hit a person. There are other things about vertical lifts that people don’t often realize. An example, when you’re unloading coils from a back of a flatbed trailer, coils are stacked and you unload a coil, if a coil swings three feet, four feet, not unheard of if you have a non-vertical pick, you hit another coil on the trailer, you can topple that coil off the trailer and a person could be in that way. There are other things that people don’t think of that this could cause like a domino effect. Sway control doesn’t really play into effect there,

How can you fix sway without non-contact measurement solutions?

– [Steven Lubeck] but sway control does play into effect when you have a die, a stamping die for example, or a slab and you’re trying to move it through a long run and you pick it up and you start moving your bridge and you accelerate very fast, then you start getting a pendulum effect and a pendulum effect will not solve itself. There’s only two ways that I know of, Mark, to deal with a pendulum, well, at least two ways to deal with a pendulum effect at that point you do the pitch and catch, stop it, let it come to rest or you have to have some sort of, well, three things. You have some sort of of sway mitigation or sway reduction or sway control of which the three of them are not exactly the same terminologies and we’ll get into that.

– [Mark Shubel] No, and the really only other thing you can do, to your point, Steve, is have a really good operator who understands that when I’m picking a load up, I don’t need to go to full speed right from the start. I need to accelerate, you know, through a set range so that I don’t get as much of this pendulum effect.

How does Active (Dynamic) Sway Control work?

– [Steven Lubeck] Right

– [Ben Hengst] So how does it prevent the pendulum effect?

– [Steven Lubeck] So, that gets into what is commonly called sway control systems. And the term sway control is a general term just like anti-collision. It’s a very general terminology. The different ways that people do sway control and people call it different things. I tend to like the term sway reduction because you can never get all the sway out of it. But there is what’s called active, what I would call active sway control. Some people call it dynamic sway control, and passive sway control. Different people who do sway control do this differently. Active sway control or dynamic sway control, as I would call it, is done with sensors. The sensors can be accelerometers, they can be cameras mounted on the underside of the hoist of the trolley looking down and looking at the position of the lower block. They can be accelerometers, like I said, they can be tilt sensors. And what happens is, is as you’re moving, if the active sway control sees your pendulum effect, if it senses the fact that your load is moving back forth in a pendulum, it will try to adjust your accelerations, your deceleration, and your speeds. So it’ll automatically affect the bridge function and the trolley function to try to correct for this.

– [Mark Shubel] So in essence, it takes an algorithm and looks at the load, the distance, the speed like Steve’s mentioning and then adjusts the drives themselves. You see that a lot in ship to shore cranes.

What are the cons of Active Sway Control?

– [Steven Lubeck] So this, but this technique though doesn’t come without its challenges. If you have a good operator and now the sway control starts affecting his movements and taking effect, that starts causing some conflict because now you are trying to move the crane and the crane is actively trying to resist what you’re doing and do something different. On the other hand, if you move a load and you’ve stopped your load and the crane is still coming to a coast, the sway control will also try to adjust the movement of load. And you could actually have it so that the sway control actually moves your load after it’s come to a slight bit of rest. Operators oftentimes have a problem with true sway control that’s active because it can have effects on the operation of the crane that are not his actions, his button presses. So when you talk about sway control, you’ll get a lot of shaking heads like, “no, no, no, “you know, we’ve done it before, we don’t like it.”

– [Mark Shubel] It’s kind of like lane control now on the new cars where it tries to steer you back into the lane and you go, why? You know, why is it doing that? I didn’t try that. So to Steve’s point, the machinery’s going, I know more about this than you do, let me do it. And you’re going, gosh, I didn’t give that input. What’s going on?

– [Steven Lubeck] Right, so that can be a little shocking to certain operators and actually it does cause a little issue in some cases in the right circumstances.

– [Mark Shubel] You’re right.

How does Passive Sway Control work?

– [Steven Lubeck] But there’s passive sway control also. So passive sway control is what I would call sway reduction. Instead of actively trying to change the movement and move the crane a little more forward or backwards or acceleration, it modifies with an algorithm, again, the acceleration curves that before the drive gets a command. So what happens is it changes the acceleration from still to second speed to third speed or, you know, to the full hertz rate on a drive in a way that either has a shape on it or in a way that you accelerate, little rest, accelerate, little rest, accelerate, little rest. So it changes the shape of the acceleration curve. And by doing that you don’t affect the operators much. Now it takes longer typically to get to full speed, it takes longer to decelerate from full speed down to nothing. But that’s very repeatable and the operator has to get used to that function. So for example, if you know that you typically let off full speed at a certain girder column in the building to put it on top of a bolster around a press, maybe with the sway reduction you have to let off halfway between the girders, a little sooner. But sway reduction makes a very repeatable stopping distance. So if you know the behavior, you can stop very repeatedly and by being able to stop very repeatedly, what happens now is that you can make small moves and you can not have to overshoot your moves. You can make small moves, not worry about the load swaying every time I jog the crane for a move and you can make much more repeatable moves. That’s the selling point of sway reduction or sway control. And the sway reduction is also done in different ways.

What are different ways to do sway reduction?

– [Steven Lubeck] Some people put sensors, accelerometers, tilt sensors. There’s also sway reduction out there that’s sensorless and the sensorless sway reduction is based off of the operator’s input onto the pendant or the radio. It’s based on a presumed height or wire rope height that you set and some other parameters. So there’s sensorless sway reduction, there’s sway reduction done with sensors. They can either be active or passive. I think if you were to survey most people in the crane industry, I think a lot of people in the crane industry will like to passive ones better than the active ones ’cause the active one will take more control of what you’re doing and it could actually make some actions that you don’t want it to happen. So there’s people who like both sides of the coin.

– [Mark Shubel] There’s a cost differential too. Passive costs less expensive, you know, than the other. And yeah, a lot of times it’s not cost effective. And really when Steve’s talking about all these movements and being able to stop repeatedly and understand how much distance you’re going to travel after you do let off on your pendant or push button on your radio, whatever, and having that repeatable from a maintenance standpoint,

How does sway reduction help maintenance costs?

– [Mark Shubel] that saves a tremendous amount of equipment where both electrically and mechanically and structurally on the overhead crane itself. Because usually what had happened in the past when operators did this is they would, what was used at the time called reverse plugging back when we had all the cranes were relay logic cranes. But basically what you were doing was taking a crane, going from full speed and then forcing it into, you know, in one direction, forcing it into full speed in another direction in essence and, or any of the speeds in another direction, but basically shifting it from one to the other. And that creates a lot of issues obviously electrically and mechanically and structurally. So operators would push the button and push the button and hit the button five or six times to move one foot for instance. And each time they were doing that, they were showing an inrush of current coming into the motors, you know, all the contactors, all the contact tips, all the mechanical devices, the brakes opening, closing, all of those things are going on. So when you have these types of technologies now, it really does save on your maintenance cost of your cranes also.

What are the cons of Passive Sway Control?

– [Steven Lubeck] So the interesting thing about sway reduction is that if you walk up to a crane and you don’t know it has sway reduction, and I have to say I am guilty of this not that long ago, and you move the bridge and you let off, if you don’t know that it has sway reduction, you don’t know that crane stops in a longer distance. It’s very easy to run into something. Like I said, I was guilty of this because I picked up the control of a crane, did not know it had sway reduction on it and almost ran into a press. Almost.

How does a combination of solutions increase efficiency?

– [Steven Lubeck] So that’s where the no-fly zones and the sway reduction kind of work together because now if you have a no-fly zone system on the crane, the no-fly zone system has been sized. So you slow, you kick out your second speed, your fast speeds a set distance away from where you want to stop and stop a longer distance away from where you would normally stop because now you’ve taken the sway reduction into account. So the operator who operates two cranes in the building, one with sway reduction, one without sway reduction, he forgets. He forgets which one is on and he doesn’t stop soon enough. The no-fly zone will automatically take care of that for him and it’ll make him stop soon enough so you don’t do any damage.

What industries use non-contact measurement solutions?

– [Ben Hengst] So what are some real world situations that you can see incorporating all three of these things, anti-sway or sway reduction, no fly zones and side pull, what are some real world situations where you can see them increasing productivity?

– [Mark Shubel] Well, I think one of the biggest areas that we’ve seen the most amount of interest right now, and Steve, you, obviously, this as your business area, but I would say that stamping and die handling have been the biggest, you know, people right now by this point. Typically what we see when we innovate and integrate, you know, like we do in our industry is we’ll see one industry pick it up and really run with it. And then other industries will catch on and go, you know, I could use this over here on what I do too. But what happens is you introduce something that changes the game for companies like this, you know, that anytime that you’ve got 40,000 pound die and you drop it, you bang into it with something there’s, it’s an expensive thing. And so when people start realizing that they can get better equipment uptime, they can have less damage to their facilities or their equipment itself in the facilities, they start going this is a good investment. And if you look at it really like the analogy we used earlier with the cars, people will do this when they buy a car, buy, you know, additional bells and whistles, if you will. The crane and hoist industry, a lot of times people go bare bones and then go, gosh, I shouldn’t have. And so what Steve does in his business in essence is, you know, he’s offering a product that you can do during the time of initial manufacturing incorporated in or you, as he mentioned, or you can do it, you know, at a later date and you can also do it piecemeal. So you can do one technology and add another and bolt on another. And so those are all benefits to customers and like I said, it’s not just a linear benefit of, “gee, it’s making it “so that I make sure my guys pick the load up straight,” but they’re going to have long-term effects that are extremely beneficial to them too.

– [Steven Lubeck] So Mark, the stamping industry, I think is the one that’s really stood out this year with us. And that’s where we’ve seen people combine all three. Injection molding, I think it’s coming around handling dies. But the stamping industry, because the dyes tend to be longer, you know, they’re longer and are three times the weight, you know, a lot of them are 80,000, 80,000 pound dies on the big stamping dies. So they’re, what they want to do is they want to keep an operator from side pulling because the areas where you store stamping dies is not that spacious. You stack stamping dies like two or three high, usually two sometimes do three high, you only have maybe four feet between the stacks. So if you pick up a die and it swings and you’re near that die, well you’re either hitting the die or hitting you. And then when you get into the bolsters around the stamping press, they’re really tight. Space is not, they don’t have tons of space. So you can’t be swinging dies, you will hit things, you will damage tooling and you’ll hit the machine. So where we found that all three come together is the side pulling to make sure that you don’t swing once it picks up, meaning you have a vertical load, the sway so that you have a steady move of the stamping die through the area where you have the bolsters and you can move quicker because it’s not swaying. You’re not forced to go slow anymore. And in combination then, once you get close to the bolster, you can also automatically slow and stop. So we have the combination of the no-fly zone, side pull, and sway, which in the stamping industry has really become, is becoming more of an important topic and people are accepting that now. And operators who used to run cranes that didn’t have sway control before are now being either forced to run them with sway control or learning how to deal with the sway control and getting more used to the sway control. Definitely the three of them definitely worked together in that industry and that industry then I found kind of overflows into the injection molding and other industries. Steel I think is still lagging behind on that sort of thing. And there are other reasons for that because they have different size loads and slabs and they pick slabs up differently. But steel industries are beginning to do the same thing now they’re getting more into more controlled movements and safer movements and whatnot and they’re picking up from what people do with stamping dyes and injection molding dyes.

– [Mark Shubel] And this is going to translate into companies that do large fabrication and large manufacturing of equipment, wind turbines, heavy equipment. Everybody who puts big things together will want to be doing this because it’s going to limit, you know, having damage to the equipment that they’re assembling to. It’s going to catch on just like all of them do. It always takes a while.

– [Steven Lubeck] Yeah, it does. If you survey sway control in particular, the number of people have sway control in the cranes and say, who still has it turned on? And you’re going to see not everyone raise their hands anymore. Some people turn it off afterwards because they get push back from operators. But once it’s fine tuned and once the operators are trained, you’ll see that come around.

– [Mark Shubel] Well Steve what, you know, you’ve been around a while. Every new technology that we introduce, we get the same type of feedback from a group of people. And it was the same thing with frequency inverters when we introduced them into the marketplace, everybody thought, well, it’s an electronic black box and it doesn’t work the way the other one did and it slows the crane down by itself, I don’t like that. And you know, I like my brake. And so we had this same type of a learning curve. And to Steve’s point though, what really, what you find is that, you know, once an operator gets used to the new product, it’s kind of like driving a new car. The first time you drive it, you’re uncomfortable with it and it’s not like your old car that you, you know, were used to for 30 years and you’re like, geez, where’s all the knobs? What do they do? And it’s the same thing with these new technologies, but to Steve’s point, I think that the more the operators use it, the more they get comfortable with it, the more accepted it’ll be and then eventually, it’ll be the norm.

– [Steven Lubeck] I think that’s why you see on drives right now, you see a lot of manufacturers actually building some of these features. Not the no fly zones because they can’t put that into a drive, but like sway control, they’ll build into drives to tell you it’s a feature you can turn on. And that’s why because they’re finding more people want that now.

How do smart measurement solutions make more competent crane operators?

– [Ben Hengst] Does anyone ever worry that you’re making it too easy and that you’re going to have incompetent crane operators?

– [Mark Shubel] Well, this is really a safeguard for incompetent crane operators really. And Steve’s been mentioning this, I mean I haven’t seen that as much as he has ’cause he’s involved in it, you know, day to day. But from what Steve told us in the last podcast, it appears that a lot of the companies feel that their operators are, you know, not people that have been in that role before in the past, are not real skilled. So they do need these things kind of as a safeguard. But to your point, I guess we are bolting on a lot of technology and does technology make us safer? I’m an old muscle car guy, so I love an old car with just a lap seatbelt, but if I get in an accident, I sure hope to God I have a shoulder harness and airbags and everything else. So it depends, I guess on really the way you view it.

– [Steven Lubeck] I mean, even the experienced operators have come to with close calls on lifting things. Maybe they’ve set one of the slings and they thought the sling was all the way on. It’s not all the way on. And then you start to lift and that makes a non vertical lift, right? So that saves them from an incident that they could have sworn that that sling was on, maybe they forgot to walk around the die and double check they’re on or maybe a pin came out, a lock pin came out. So even the most experienced operators, especially in like a stamping kind of arena where they’re doing changeovers very quickly, they can make some mistakes here or there or get distracted. So if you look at it that way, it helps the experienced operators from making the dumb mistakes, the rookie mistakes that they shouldn’t make because they got distracted from something. So it helps them as well, but it also helps train the new ones. So the newer operators now get trained that you, you know, like Mark mentioned earlier, you have to be in about this position to run your bridge all the way through. And if you’re in that position and run your bridge all the way through, you will clear everything. So over time, if they have it off to the side a little bit and the crane slows and stops, they’ll eventually learn to put the bridge here and you could cut out a minute or so maybe out of your travel and every time you cut out a minute out of travel, you’re cutting out time. So it does promote safe behavior and more productive behavior because now they know that the crane’s automatically going to stop if they don’t put it in the right position and they don’t want to keep stopping the crane. So it does help promote safe behavior.

Learn more about smart non-contact measurement solutions

– [Ben Hengst] All right, thanks Steve. So how can people get ahold of you?

– [Steven Lubeck] You can get information on our website, which is laser-view.com. Info@laser-view.com is the best way that myself and others will see an inquiry. You’re also welcome to call the office and just talk about a challenge or a problem. Just as well, if you call Mazzella and you know, you call Mark or Kenny Wright or anyone at Mazzella, oftentimes, you know, if it’s something that we can help you guys with, they’ll contact us as well. No problem looking at a layout or just listening to what’s happened and what you need to do. And we can come up with solutions around all these technologies. So a call or an email is perfect.

– [Ben Hengst] All right. Thanks, Steve. Check out Laser View Technologies and you can get ahold of myself, Mark, or any of our other experts at MazzellaCompanies.com. Don’t forget to pop into our learning center. We have a ton of information on overhead cranes there. We wrap up this three part series on creating a safer and more efficient work zone with smart non-contact measurement solutions with a discussion on how they can improve the maintenance and reliability of your overhead crane. You can subscribe to Safety Factor wherever you listen to your podcasts or watch it on the Lifting and Rigging channel on YouTube. Thanks for watching and stay safe out there.