SGC-250, better known as Big Carl, is the world’s largest land crane. It can lift a record weight of 5,000 tonnes (equal to a thousand cars at the same time) and reaches a height of 250 metres. This is what it is used for.
The Belgian construction company Sarens he built the largest land crane in the world. Is called “Big Carl” (Grande Carlo, from the name of the technical director Carl Sarens of the Sarens Group) and has a monstrous load capacity of 5,000 tons. The maximum load moment, i.e. the measurement of the force applied to the crane during lifting operations (related to load, friction, inertia of the moving parts etc etc), is equal to well 250,000 tons. With this threshold it can lift loads weighing 5,000 tonnes in complete safety and stability, equal to the weight of a thousands of cars.
Big Carl, whose technical name SGC-250at full extension it can reach an extreme height of 250 metersa real colossus. It was presented to the world in 2018 in the port of Ghent, Belgium, where it showed off its “muscles”, driven by a dozen very powerful engines. This is a ring crane with the ability to rotate 360 degrees; the largest range is up to 100 meters, but the main arm can reach up to 160 meters.
Clearly such a “monster” is not used in routine construction work, but on highly specialized construction sites, such as those to build a modern nuclear power plant based on very heavy pre-assembled modules. The largest project for which it was used was the construction of one of these power plants, that of Hinkley Point C in the city of Bridgwater, in the English county of Somerset. The power plant, which became operational in 1965, is continuously updated and the project now involves the construction of sector C characterized by two European pressurized water nuclear reactors (EPR). The project involves the net supply of 3,260 MW and its construction began in 2017. The objective is to make it fully operational by 2027 with an estimated cost of 25 billion pounds.
The close-up image of a star from another galaxy obtained for the first time: it is the “monster”
To achieve this, the support of Big Carl was fundamental, as in 2022 it placed the last of three colossal steel rings weighing over 300 tons of the plant’s nuclear reactor. “This crane stands out from all other cranes on the market with its unrivaled capacity and unique on-site repositioning system, which means it can easily perform lifts into different positions. This is a feature never seen in the industry. Furthermore, its unrivaled capacity allows our customers to lift even larger and heavier loads, while still benefiting from the specific flexibility of the crane” underlined the Sarens Group.
