Building a utility-scale wind turbine requires a lot of heavy machinery. Today’s Wind View shows off some of the equipment we use when lifting a rotor (hub + three blades, shown on the ground in this photo) to attach it to the generator during Wind for Industry project construction!
Lifting the rotor, like many of our critical lifts, is a “tandem pick,” which means this step requires two cranes, adding engineering and operational complexities.
Pictured below, you can see:
- A Manitowoc 16000 crane, referred to as the “main crane,” which does the heavy lifting (it’s the red crane in this photo, with the yellow rigging attached around the blades)
- A Link Belt 1100 crane, referred to as the “tail crane,” which is smaller and used for guidance and maneuverability during the lift (the white and black crane shown here with rigging closer to the tip of a blade)
- An articulating manlift, used to lift technicians (in this photo, it’s the green machine lifting an intern and a field engineer to facilitate removal of rigging from the tail blade, when the main crane takes control of the load)
- A John Deere dozer, used for a number of activities on site (that’s the yellow machine by the blade tip in this photo). In this instance, the dozer will hold a tagline, which is a strong rope that keeps the rotor from shifting during the lift.
While these machines have industrial strength, they couldn’t get the job done without the expertise of our in-house operators, technicians, and engineers!
