RaycoWylie is synonymous with crane safety systems. Cranes and Lifting spoke to the Australian and international teams.
In one form or another, RaycoWylie Systems has been revolutionising crane safety and crane monitoring since the mid 1930s.
Today, the company provides holistic monitoring systems for all categories of cranes, and these systems feature simple, intuitive controls and straight-forward, precise procedures. With offices in Canada, US, UK, Egypt and Singapore, RaycoWylie launched the Australian operation just over 12 months ago.
CAL caught up with Laurent Despres, Group Operations Manager, Jean Pierre Thomas, General Manager UK operation, and Steve Smith, Director of the Australian operation, at the CICA conference and exhibition.
“RaycoWylie Systems is a Canadian company founded 1979. It purchased Wylie Systems 1994. Wylie Systems, a UK company, has been synonymous with crane monitoring since the 1930’s, and with the purchase, we combined both range limiting and safe load indicator capabilities, ” Despres said.
“Today, we develop and manufacture a range of safe load indicators (SLI) and load movement indicators (LMI) for the crane sector. We have been involved in the mobile market for a long time and more recently moved into the tower crane business providing indicator zoning, anti-collision and custom built solutions.
“Our zoning system features different sensors which provide details of the crane’s position and the load, at all times. We can then define the safe working zone area and prevent the crane from operating over a road, for example. Our anti collision system is the link between a number of cranes and prevents a collision when they are all operating,” he said.
“RaycoWylie Australia was launched just over a year and we’ve seen initial success with the tower crane market and more recently in the mobile crane sector with medium to small size crawlers,” Smith said. “We’re been working on projects in a number of industry sectors, including construction, defence and maritime and these industries are mainly consuming our i4500 system.”
The i4500 series of systems (i4500, i4507 and i4510) have been developed to meet the ever demanding regulations and standards of the crane and lifting industry while maintaining simple, clear information for the operator.
The series offers screen sizes with a full colour display in 4.3”, 7” and 10.4” models. With self-diagnostics, operator usability, and ease of calibration the i4500 series uses the CANbus J1939 protocol to communicate with each interface, constantly monitoring all the cranes sensors to give clear accurate information to the operator. The CANbus network also allows huge amounts of flexibility allowing customers the ability to add or remove sensors when required at any time throughout the life of the equipment.
“In terms of safety the main issue with mobile cranes is to prevent the machine from tilting. It’s very difficult for the operator to know exactly what the load weighs so at a minimum, you need a system that informs the operator the weight because the operator isn’t always able to check with the load table to determine if the load is safe or not.” Smith said.
“You can’t drive the machine and measure the distance and the radius etc. so the aim of the LMI system and the SLI is to provide the crane operator the maximum amount of information to drive the machine safely.
“Traditionally, the main mistake I find is the wrong spec’d crane operating on the job. You might be using a 90-tonne crane for a lift when they should be using a 110-tonne crane, but they’ll squeeze the extra performance out of the smaller crane. This may be because the project can’t afford the larger crane, or site location and access limits the size of crane. I liken the crane sector to the aviation industry; why do they have warnings systems on aircrafts for pilots? Because there is always a margin of human error and that’s what we are looking to eliminate,” Smith said.
“We can also provide the option to retrieve data from our data logger system, said Thomas. “Whether the customer wants it or not, the system is always monitoring and recording operations and the fact that the operator knows this, usually prevents them from doing to the wrong thing. The data logger was developed some time ago but it’s not always used by the client.
“In Singapore, the level of safety requirements is higher than in other parts of the world. Crane operations use the data logger system and other special function like sending an email or a message if the machine has been over ridden.
“The aim of the data logger is not to police the operator but to help if something happens and to work out why, this increases the level of safety of operations and also or the level of safety procedures on the site,” he said.
“Construction sites are getting more and more crowded which increases the difficulty of managing lifts. RaycoWylie provides assistance to the operator and should something happen, we know why and we know how to prevent it happening again.”