We were approached by one of our customers to help them to modernize two of their rail mounted gantry cranes as their current equipment was obsolete, causing fault finding and repairs to become more troublesome.

The main body of the upgrade was a change from and S5 PLC and to an S7 PLC with associated drives.

We worked closely with our customer to minimize disruption to their work schedule and we made sure that they always had one crane available to work at any given time.

During this upgrade we came across faults that had been misunderstood on both cranes in the past due to a lack of access to the crane’s program, we rectified these faults along the way to increase reliability for the future.

The contents of this upgrade included:

• Full PLC upgrade

• Removal of old Siemens S5 hardware

• Installation of new Siemens S7 hardware

• Completely new S7 based program tailored to the crane

• CMS installation (Crane Monitoring System) including new touch screens in the drivers cabin and electrical house allowing easier fault finding

• Removal of old DC Drives

• Installation of new DC drives including all alterations that had to be made to mount the new drives and chokes

• Drive tuning and alterations tailored to the preference of the on site crane operators