goes live nGen goes live nGen - Hongkong International Terminals

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8 Quayside New crane de<strong>live</strong>ry to meet of giant carriers The next generation of Super Post- Panamax vessels are moving off the drawing board and into production in shipyards across Europe and Asia. Now HIT is taking steps to ensure that it can provide sufficient quay cranes to handle these new giants of the sea, well into the future. Five new quay cranes arrived at Kwai Chung recently from the Zhenhu Port Machinery Company (ZPMC) fabrication sites in Shanghai, all equipped to handle a reach of 23 containers across and a height of 43 metres. Three of these cranes have been deployed at designated HIT terminals throughout Kwai Chung. With vessels of 8,000-TEU already sailing the seas and plans for ships of more than 10,000-TEU in the planning stage, container terminals have to ramp up their own facilities in order to accommodate these behemoths. These new 1,400 tonne cranes are part of an ongoing process at HIT to maximise the limited land available in the yard through automation, improved efficiency and increased productivity, according to Simon Wong, General Manager, Engineering Department. “In order to meet the need of handling a larger throughput of containers from Super Post-Panamax vessels, we have improved space management by stacking one over six and improved the performance of Rubber Tyred Gantry HIT News, Spring 2005 Cranes through auto steering. This has been beneficial to overall yard handling performance. We have also upgraded container positioning determination equipment on yard cranes to accurately detect and retrieve containers,” said Simon. Saving precious seconds from quay crane move has a beneficial and cumulative impact on quay side efficiency. And the tractor alignment system has also proved to be a simple yet effective way of guiding drivers to the correct position for quay crane lifts. The yard crane lifts will be looked at next. “We use a set of lights that are illuminated when the tractor and trailer are in the correct position, without this the driver has to move his chassis backwards and forwards until the right alignment with the crane hoist,” said Simon. Eddy Ma, General Manager of Terminal Operations, looked at how the market was driving the change for larger vessels. “We are seeing an increasing demand for raw materials from China and manufactured products made in China for export around the world. Shipping lines are looking for economies of scale so as to reduce the cost of adding frequency to meet this growing demand for additional capacity on major east-west line haul routes,” said Eddy. “As a result of this, shipping lines are looking to deploy larger vessels to ensure that they have the capacity to meet this growing demand, particularly at the hub ports,” he added. With the larger vessels, increased draft is required in the access channel and also alongside the berth; and HIT has also taken the necessary steps to address this issue. “We have to pay close attention to the market and look at what is on the horizon in order to plan ahead. We have taken an holistic approach at HIT looking at how we can maximise efficiency in our 92 hectares facility which extends to operations on the quayside, quay lanes, container yard and the gates,” concluded Eddy.
demand HIT News, Spring 2005 9
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