Walking into the conference room of Shandong Longhui Hoisting Machinery Co., Ltd., one detail caught your attention: beside each seat, in addition to a complete set of product technical manuals, there was also a calculator thoughtfully placed.
Why do you need a calculator?
According to the relevant person in charge of the company, the brand specializes in fully customized lifting equipment. Each piece of equipment must match the customer’s exclusive operation scenario, load-bearing requirements, and site conditions. From steel plate material selection, main beam structure to transmission components, any parameter adjustment will affect cost accounting. A small calculator is an indispensable tool in R&D docking and business negotiations.
As a company that has been deeply involved in the hoisting machinery industry for more than 20 years, Longhui Crane has relied on this excellence and continuous innovation to break the foreign technology monopoly step by step. With a set of full life cycle green technology based on digital twins, domestic cranes have achieved a comprehensive leap forward in intelligence, energy saving, and quality improvement.
The company was founded in 2005 and has focused on the research and development and manufacturing of bridge-type and gantry-type intelligent cranes for many years. Its container cranes and grab cranes have established themselves in the market with their stable performance. They not only successfully replace imported products, but also serve extensively in various places such as railway freight yards, thermal power plants, and garbage treatment centers.
In recent years, the company has continued to build an innovation platform, established a professional R&D team, holds more than 100 patents and multiple software copyrights, and has been awarded national-level specialization “Little Giant” and provincial-level manufacturing individual champions. It is the backbone of the domestic high-end equipment manufacturing field.
In the past, the core technology of domestic high-end lifting machinery was monopolized by foreign countries for a long time. Problems such as high energy consumption, bulky size, and difficulty in operation and maintenance of the equipment were prominent.
Aiming at the pain points of the industry, the company relied on local major scientific and technological innovation support policies to launch a research project on green key technologies for the entire life cycle of lifting machinery based on digital twins.
Taking green development as the direction, the team started with lightweight equipment structures and streamlined optimization of transmission mechanisms, coupled with digital monitoring methods to grasp the operating status of equipment in real time and predict the service life of parts.
At the same time, a complete green evaluation system has been established to quantitatively analyze indicators such as energy consumption, materials, and environmental protection, and then feed the data back to the product design end to form a virtuous cycle of research and development, use, and optimization.
After repeated trials and polishing, the project has successively conquered many core technologies.
The new design greatly improves component utilization and reduces overall costs without reducing the equipment’s load-bearing capacity and operational reliability; the self-developed differential planetary reducer makes the transmission components smaller and has higher power density.
The team also innovatively built a multi-dimensional evaluation model to clarify the relationship between equipment modules, energy consumption and environmental protection, opening up a new path for the green transformation of lifting machinery.
After the implementation of the entire set of technologies, equipment energy consumption and pollutant emissions dropped significantly, which not only improved the product market competitiveness, but also assisted the implementation of the “double carbon” strategy with practical actions.
Behind this outstanding achievement is a research and development story full of ingenuity and persistence.
In the early years, special grabbing cranes were completely dependent on imports, and domestic companies rarely got involved.
Some of the earliest Arab customers came to China to seek grabbing and lifting equipment, but failed to find solutions in many places, so they came to Longhui Lifting after being recommended.
At that time, the company’s research and development conditions were limited, and the technicians found inspiration from the claw machine in the shopping mall.
Without laser positioning technology, everyone divided the working area into multiple blocks, relied on the weight change after grabbing to judge the working status, and worked out the basic grabbing logic step by step.
Technological exploration has never stopped, and the team subsequently introduced laser vision scanning technology to achieve precise capture of the entire area.
Relying on the implementation of major scientific and technological innovation projects, the R&D team once again upgraded the equipment “smart brain” to realize automatic scanning, intelligent grabbing, and independent route planning.
In view of the industry problem that the flexible connection of the spreader is easy to shake, technicians optimized the PLC intelligent control system to firmly control the swing amplitude within 5 cm.
Combining the needs of different working conditions, the equipment body is made of special materials and anti-rust technology, taking into account both lightweight and high load-bearing, and is perfectly adapted to harsh environments with high temperature, high humidity and corrosion.
Today’s cranes are also equipped with health monitoring systems, which can detect potential faults in advance and remind them to replace vulnerable parts. It is like equipping the equipment with a dedicated “physical examiner” to nip problems in the bud.
Today, this innovative technology has been fully applied to the company’s entire range of products.
The company has built a special production line for lightweight cranes, with an annual production capacity of up to 600 units (sets).
Since the project was launched, the cumulative sales revenue has increased by 40 million yuan, created a profit of 5 million yuan, paid taxes of 3.9 million yuan, and indirectly driven the upstream and downstream industries to achieve economic benefits of 150 million yuan.
A technological breakthrough leads to the upgrading of an industrial chain.
The innovative practice of Longhui Crane has not only made up for the technical shortcomings of the hoisting machinery industry, strengthened the domestic mining equipment and engineering machinery industry chain, but also promoted the transformation of the entire industry from traditional manufacturing to green and intelligent manufacturing, and has also allowed more cost-effective domestic high-end equipment to be recognized by global customers.
