10 Years of Zero Failures! A Documentary on the STEP Quay Crane Drive Inverter Serving the World’s Largest Port
2023-07-21
In the height of summer, at midday under a scorching sun, the Waigaoqiao Terminal of Shanghai Port—the world’s largest port—is bustling with activity and teeming with traffic. At berth number 130, a quay crane is in operation. Between lifts and hoists, one after another colossal 30-ton-plus TEU containers—standard shipping containers—are steadily positioned into place, guided by steel cables. With its ability to seamlessly switch between rigidity and flexibility, moving swiftly or slowly as needed, this crane has been in service for over a decade.
The drive and control core supporting the No. 130 quay crane is none other than the STEP frequency inverter!
Quay crane No. 130, located at the westernmost end of the shoreline at Waigaoqiao Terminal, was manufactured in 2003 by Zhenhua Heavy Industries, a leading enterprise in the port machinery industry. It has a lifting height of 22 meters, a machine room height of 27 meters, and a load capacity of 40 tons. Originally, it was equipped with frequency converters from imported brands to provide electrical drive for the trolley, hoist, luffing, and slewing mechanisms.
In 2012, due to the aging of the core electrical drive units and frequent malfunctions, Shanghai Port Group decided to upgrade and retrofit the electrical drives of some existing quay cranes. For a long time, quay-crane drive control has been dominated by international giants in the variable-frequency drive (VFD) industry. If domestic-brand VFDs were used in quay-crane drive control systems, owners would undoubtedly have serious doubts about their safety and reliability. In such a field where domestic brands have long been considered out of reach, breaking the monopoly held by foreign companies presents an enormous challenge for Chinese brands.
Holding a “let’s give it a shot” attitude, the client conducted a thorough evaluation of STEP—and was pleasantly surprised to find that all of STEP’s inverter technical specifications met the requirements. As a result, STEP was awarded the sole opportunity to provide a domestically produced replacement for one of the 27 quay cranes.
Unexpectedly, the innovative pioneers who dared to challenge the impossible collaborated closely with Zhenhua Port Machinery, turning the client’s decision from that year into a new industry legend.
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In 2012, engineers from STEP commissioned the new control room for the 130-quay crane.
Over the past decade, quay crane No. 130 has averaged 18,000 TEUs handled per month, accumulating over 2.2 million TEUs in total, with a combined handling weight exceeding 65 million tons! Even more remarkable is that it has maintained a record of zero failures over the past ten years. Today, STEP frequency converters continue quietly to set new benchmarks for the stable operation of domestically produced frequency converters in the quay crane sector. STEP performance has fully lived up to the trust placed in it by Shanghai Port Group. The crane operator at Shanghai Port jokingly calls it the “Chinese Model Worker” among the 27 quay cranes lining the 2,100-meter berth of Outer Berth No. 2.
A quay crane, or shore-based container crane for short, is equipment used to load and unload containers from ships at the shoreline. It is a quintessential example of heavy-duty construction machinery and a flagship piece of equipment in the lifting industry—known for its high technical complexity, intense operational demands, long maintenance intervals, and stringent reliability requirements.
Currently, the Port of Shanghai handles a container throughput of 47 million TEUs, ranking first globally for over a decade. The Phase II project of the Waigaoqiao Port Area (now operated by Zhendong Company) is an important component of Shanghai’s efforts to build an international shipping center. In 2022, Zhendong Company achieved a total container handling throughput of 6.0023 million TEUs for the entire year, including 1.2516 million TEUs handled by barge and an additional 75,000 TEUs processed by shuttle buses.
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