Australian engineering ingenuity is giving an age-old product a new twist with the development of advanced heavy-duty turntables incorporating positional technology and collision avoidance systems.
Bendigo-based Australian Turntable Company is designing and manufacturing an astonishing array of sophisticated rotating solutions for sectors including residential building, commercial and industrial construction, mining, exhibitions, motor vehicle retail, shipping, aviation and even the arts.
One of its major jobs is for expansion of the Adelaide Convention Centre, where the company is working on rotating banks of seats to turn a 3,500-seat auditorium into a number of smaller theatres.
Not that designing and making rotating platforms is any big deal, says operations manager Bassam El Aawar. The test is in coordinating all of the other systems that add value to the platform.
In Adelaide, a 1.5 m slip ring will be used to house fibre optic communication, computer networks, and firefighting services, which are transferred from fixed services outside the rotating platform.
Meanwhile, the company’s been working on detection systems to prevent audience members getting caught between at the edge of the rotating section and it’s coming up with ways to eliminate vibration generated by people moving on the platform.
For El Aawar who holds a Bachelor of Computer and Communication Engineering from the American University of Beirut, the Adelaide job exemplifies the value of thinking outside the box.
“The sign of a good engineering exercise is to forget about the constraints tying us to what we know and to instead work out the right material or design to use for the application, even if it is far away from the scope of our experience or education.”
Another key growth area for the company is mining. It’s taken three years of “challenging” design and development work but the Australian Turntable Company now has a turntable for dump trucks of up to 360 t capacity, says El Aawar.
It’s a completely different product for the company, says El Aawar.
“Just to give an example – the loading on a revolving restaurant ranges between 250-500 kg/m2. For the mining trucks turntables we’re talking about 1 t/m2. That’s talking about uniformly distributed load. When it comes to mining, there’s much more to consider, especially the point load of 700 t divided over only six wheels.
“So it’s a very small footprint of a metre squared with at least 150 t of weight,” says El Aawar. As a result, the mining turntable is much deeper – at around 3 m – than the company’s usual product.
The turntable is designed to improve dump cycle times of a truck fleet by rotating the truck at a dump station within 15 s.
It’s much more complicated than it looks, says El Aawar, because of all the different systems it incorporates.
“It’s driven by four motors on a large screw bearing, which is taking most of the load. The screw bearing itself is around 10 t weight and it’s around 7 m in diameter,” he says.
Feeding all of the electrical and communications requirements through a rotating object was the challenging bit, says El Aawar. The company turned to wind turbine technology, to borrow a slip ring for the task.
Then there’s a slew ring, found in excavators and shovels, that’s used as a centre rotational part and hydraulics to lift ramps up and down to secure the truck on the platform.
A load cell weighs the truck and there are controls and distance sensors to make sure the truck is positioned in the right spot.
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