Huisman harnesses fibrerope benefits with hybrid crane

Cees van Veluw, product manager cranes, Huisman, said: “We s believe in the future of cranes with fibrerope included – not just because of a capex and opex evaluation, but also to further shift the limit of what can be deployed in subsea applications.

Van Veluw pointed to Huisman’s research, which shows that fibrerope requires significant cooling when performing active heave compensation. But thermal behaviour of fiber ropes has proven to be unreliable to predict and hard to measure. “On top of that, having the active cooling system of the fiber rope as an essential part of the crane’s safety system is not the way we see robust and reliable crane design,” he added.

Spooling of the sensitive fibrerope is performed by Huisman’s traction winch and storage winch setup, while active heave compensation uses a steel wire rope on a direct winch. For traditional knuckle boom cranes, a 120-tonne and 200-tonne version is available, while the recently introduced hybrid boom crane can be delivered with larger capacities of 400 and 600 tonnes.

The full load of the crane system is available at all depths, allowing a deployment of up to 600 tonnes at depths of 4,000m and beyond.