Liebherr wins Heavy Lift Award in the Innovation category

The Innovation Award is presented to companies that have developed an innovative piece of equipment or technology to improve the transport or lifting of heavy and oversized cargoes.

The main prize in this category went to Liebherr this year. The company was described by the jury as a "master of innovation" and honoured for combining several innovations in one solution: the LR 12500-1.0 crawler crane sets new standards in the industry. The 2,500-tonne crane was designed as an economical crawler crane for global projects and raises the performance and transport capability of cranes in this class to a new level.

HighPerformanceBoom for maximum performance

The key to its high lifting capacities is its wide lattice boom. The solutions to date have been a double boom like the PowerBoom or the widespread SX systems. However, the Liebherr designers chose a completely different path during the design process for the LR 12500-1.0 – they developed a powerful 7.5-metre-wide lattice boom which enables the LR 12500-1.0 to set new standards.

This HighPerformanceBoom gives the crane the power and stability of a PowerBoom whilst also reducing its weight. It is the key to the high lifting capacities of the powerful 2,500-tonne machine. For Liebherr, the next logical step after the PowerBoom and the SX boom was to develop the HighPerformanceBoom. The key attribute of this advanced development is the fact that the forces are transferred in the full width to the slewing platform.

Smart solution for economical transport

Liebherr came up with something very special to enable such a wide boom to be transported economically – simply fold it up! However, this requires a sophisticated mechanism. The folded ten metre boom sections are then unfolded again on site and assembled using a special device. This stabilises the lattice type sections during the assembly process. As far as the dimensions are concerned, they were based on the container concept.