Grab Bucket Empowerment, Green Recycling | Grab Bucket Double Girder Crane Facilitates Efficient Slag Resource Recovery at Shagang Group

As a benchmark for private steel enterprises in China, Jiangsu Shagang Group has always adhered to green and low-carbon development as its core strategy. In the entire steel production process, the harmless treatment and resource recovery of blast furnace/converter slag are crucial for achieving “turning waste into treasure” and reducing environmental impact. To address the pain points of low efficiency, heavy dust pollution, and high safety risks associated with traditional slag transfer methods, Shagang Group introduced our customized grab bucket double girder crane to create an efficient, intelligent, and environmentally friendly slag resource recovery production line, setting a benchmark for the green transformation of the steel industry.

Project Background: The Green Transformation Challenges of a Steel Giant

As a globally important steel production base, Shagang Group generates over ten million tons of industrial solid waste annually, including blast furnace slag and converter slag. Traditional slag transfer relies on manual labor combined with excavator operations, which presents three core pain points:

Efficiency Bottleneck: Manually operating excavators for loading limits the amount of material transferred per batch, making it difficult to match the continuous operation rhythm of the production line, resulting in raw material backlog and long waiting times on the production line.

Environmental Pressures: Dust generated during slag transfer not only pollutes the workshop environment but also poses a threat to the health of operators, failing to meet national environmental standards and the company’s green development requirements.

Safety Hazards: Manual close-range operations are susceptible to risks such as material collapse and equipment collisions. Furthermore, high-intensity repetitive labor can lead to operator fatigue, increasing the probability of accidents.

Based on this, Shagang Group proposed a specific requirement: a customized grab bucket double-girder crane system adapted to the characteristics of slag to achieve automated, enclosed, and efficient slag transfer, while meeting the heavy-load requirements of 24-hour continuous operation of the production line.

Customized Solution: Grab Bucket Double-Girder Crane, Precisely Adapted to Slag Resource Utilization Scenarios

Targeting the working conditions of Shagang Group’s slag processing workshop, our technical team conducted in-depth research on parameters such as slag particle size, moisture content, and bulk density, and tailored an integrated grab bucket double-girder crane solution, achieving full-dimensional customized adaptation from structural design and grab bucket selection to intelligent control.

1. Core Hardware: Heavy-Duty Structure, Solid Foundation for High Efficiency

Double-Beam Heavy-Duty Main Beam: Utilizing a Q345B low-alloy high-strength steel box-type welded structure, undergoing overall annealing stress relief treatment and 100% non-destructive testing, ensuring no deformation or sagging under high-frequency heavy-duty operations, suitable for the large-span, large-tonnage lifting needs of the Shagang workshop.

Customized Grab Bucket System: Addressing the uneven particle size and dust-prone characteristics of slag, a heavy-duty hydraulic grab bucket is selected. The grab bucket’s cutting edge is made of wear-resistant alloy material, ensuring a tight seal and effectively preventing dust leakage during transport. The grab bucket volume can be flexibly adjusted according to batch requirements, with a single grab capacity of 8-12 tons, significantly improving transport efficiency.

High-Efficiency Lifting Mechanism: Equipped with a hardened gear reducer and dual brake motors, the lifting speed is adjustable from 0.5-10m/min. Combined with a trolley/gantry frequency conversion speed control system, it achieves smooth connection between slag grabbing, transporting, and unloading, avoiding material spillage and equipment impact.

2. Intelligent Control: Automated Collaboration Unlocks Production Efficiency

One-Click Operation: The system supports fully automated “automatic grabbing – automatic transfer – fixed-point unloading.” Operators only need to set parameters in the control room to complete the transfer of a single batch of slag, significantly reducing manual intervention.

Precise Positioning and Unloading: Through absolute travel limiters and laser positioning technology, the crane can precisely dock with the production line feed hopper, controlling the unloading error within ±5cm, ensuring that the slag enters the crushing and sorting processes evenly and avoiding hopper blockage.

Multi-Machine Collaborative Scheduling: Multiple grab bucket double-girder cranes in the workshop can be linked through a central scheduling system. Based on raw material pool inventory and production line load, transfer tasks are intelligently allocated, achieving “on-demand scheduling and efficient collaboration.”

3. Environmental Protection and Safety: Multiple Protections Safeguard Green Production

Closed-Loop Transfer: The grab bucket closed design, combined with the workshop negative pressure dust removal system, suppresses dust diffusion at the source, reducing the dust concentration in the workshop to below national limits, achieving “green transfer.” Full-Scene Safety Protection: Equipped with multiple safety devices including a lifting capacity limiter, anti-detachment device, anti-collision sensor, and audible and visual alarm, the grab bucket also features a built-in material detachment locking mechanism, mitigating safety risks at the source. The control room adopts a sealed and soundproof design, effectively isolating dust and noise to protect the health of operators.

Emergency Redundancy Guarantee: The system supports functions such as emergency hook lowering during power outages and fault self-diagnosis, enabling rapid response in emergencies to ensure uninterrupted production and guaranteed safety.

Project Implementation: Green Empowerment, Remarkable Results: After on-site installation, commissioning, and personnel training, this grab bucket double-girder crane system was officially put into operation in the slag resource utilization workshop of Shagang Group in 2023. It is deeply integrated into the entire process of slag crushing, sorting, and recycled aggregate preparation, achieving significant economic and environmental benefits.

1. Significantly Increased Production Efficiency: The automated grab bucket transfer system has completely replaced the traditional manual labor + excavator model. The transfer time for a single batch of slag has been reduced from 40 minutes to 12 minutes. The daily slag processing capacity of the production line has increased from 800 tons to 2000 tons, with an annual processing capacity exceeding 700,000 tons, effectively ensuring Shagang Group’s green goal of “daily production and daily disposal” of slag.

2. Comprehensive Compliance with Environmental Standards: The enclosed grab bucket system, in conjunction with the dust removal system, has reduced dust concentration in the workshop by 90%, completely resolving the problem of fugitive emissions. It has successfully passed national environmental inspections and the company’s internal green factory certification, becoming an environmental benchmark for solid waste treatment in the steel industry.

3. Dual Optimization of Safety and Cost: Safety is controllable: “Zero-close-range operation” for operators has been achieved. Since its implementation, no safety accidents have occurred, significantly reducing occupational health risks for workers.

Cost Optimization: The project reduced on-site operator staff by 50%, lowered equipment maintenance costs by 35% compared to traditional methods, and generated over ten million yuan in annual revenue from recycled aggregates and metal recovery products, achieving a win-win situation of “environmental protection + economic benefits.”

4. Prominent Industry Demonstration Effect: This project has become a typical case of slag resource utilization in the steel industry. Its “grab bucket double girder crane + automated production line” model has been adopted and promoted by many large steel companies in China. A relevant person in charge of Shagang Group stated: “This customized grab bucket double girder crane system not only solved our long-standing problem of slag transfer, but also showed us the empowering role of intelligent technology in green production, which is an important support for achieving our ‘dual carbon’ goals.”

Conclusion: Starting from the green transformation needs of steel giants and solving industry pain points with customized technical solutions, the successful application of our grab bucket double girder crane at Shagang Group once again demonstrates the value of deep integration between industrial lifting equipment and green manufacturing. In the future, we will continue to focus on the field of steel solid waste treatment, and help China’s steel industry move towards a higher level of green and circular development with smarter, more environmentally friendly and more efficient hoisting solutions.