Superlative slab transporter: hot iron on the road

On Whit Monday, Kamag Transporttechnik, a company of the TII Group, sent a very special slab transporter on its way to the customer. It’s not just the heavy load, length of 71 metres and a total transport weight of around 360 tonnes the transport is extraordinary. With a payload of 150 tonnes this industrial vehicle belongs to the strongest vehicles in class. The vehicle is also testament to amazing engineering expertise.

Kamag Transporttechnik has developed a slab transporter with a hitherto unrivalled payload on behalf of steel giant ArcelorMittal. The steel producer’s call for tender specified a load of 150 tonnes. The customer also expected very high lifting performance from the grippers, which are used to raise the slabs, of 2.5 metres in 25 seconds. Slabs, semi-finished products in the steel industry, are large blocks of steel that can weigh up to 30 tonnes each, depending on the design, and are transported in stacks within the steelworks. They can still be up to 900 degrees Celsius when they come off the continuous caster. The resulting extremely high temperature increase in the vehicle requires numerous technical protective measures.

To facilitate the required payload, the Kamag engineers had to completely redevelop the vehicle’s trailing unit, which would bear the highest loads when transporting the slabs. The Ulm industrial vehicle specialists were able to use an existing design and proven drive components for the front end. They broke new ground with the so-called “fatigue calculation”. This enables them to make predictions about the service life of the vehicle construction, for example. The customer stipulated that the frame could not develop any cracks for at least ten years of round-the-clock transporter operations under the extreme working conditions in a steelworks. 

Transporting the empty 132-tonne slab transporter to the customer proved equally as challenging as the design of the new slab transporter. Transport experts from Spedition Kübler assisted the vehicle manufacturer in this regard. To move the colossus Kübler used two InterCombi transport platforms with twelve and ten axle lines and a lifting bridge. Both products come from Scheuerle. Kamag Transporttechnik and Scheuerle are both part of the TII Group of Heilbronn multi-entrepreneur Otto Rettenmaier, and this transport is certainly an impressive example of the synergy between the TII companies. 

In total, the heavy load measures 71 metres long, 6.6 metres wide and 5.4 metres high. Two truck-mounted cranes from Ulm-based Rieger & Moser were used for the laborious loading onto the heavy load vehicle. The push-and-pull combi unit travelled 260 kilometres on public roads from the Kamag site in the Ulm-Donautal industrial area to the port at Heilbronn. There, the slab transporter was moved onto a barge for the final stage of its journey to the steel producer’s dock. 

Slab transporters are just one of the transport solutions Kamag Transporttechnik supplies to the steel industry. The Ulm manufacturer of special vehicles also makes transporters for slag pots, ladles, U-frames and scrap baskets, as well as industrial lifting and coil vehicles. All of these transporters are designed to withstand the extreme conditions of steel production, such as intense heat, high tonnages, dirt ingress and dusty bulk material.