Crane Wheels Designed for Operational Reliability Safety and Longevity in Metallurgical Industry Applications

Crane wheels, as critical and key equipment for safe and normal production in the metallurgical industry, have always drawn great attention regarding their operational reliability, safety, and longevity. Constrained by traditional metallurgical processes, domestic crane wheels in the three decades before the reform and opening-up were basically small-scale modifications and developments based on the former Soviet Union's designs. With the continuous deepening of reform and opening-up and the introduction of a large amount of advanced foreign technology, modern crane wheels have also undergone significant changes.

When people refer to crane wheels, they generally mean those used in metallurgical enterprises, such as ladle cranes, scrap charging cranes, slab handling cranes, coil tong cranes, magnet cranes, and other overhead cranes with higher working classifications serving metallurgical plants. Due to changes in the steelmaking, continuous casting (ingot casting), and rolling processes in metallurgical enterprises, traditional crane wheels used in ingot stripping cranes, soaking pit tong cranes, rigid rake cranes, open-hearth charging cranes, soaking pit lid-removing cranes, and other similar equipment have gradually become obsolete.

Wheels are devices used to support the crane and its load, enabling the crane to travel back and forth on the rails. The main forms of wheel damage are wear, crushing of the hardened layer, and pitting. The wheel material generally adopts ZG430-640 cast steel. In order to improve the wear resistance and service life of the wheel tread surface, surface heat treatment is required, with a surface hardness of HB300–350 and a hardened layer depth of not less than 20 mm.

The horizontal skew value of the wheel on the crane traveling mechanism is an important technical parameter. Excessive skew can cause rail biting, increase traveling resistance, generate vibration and noise, accelerate wear on both the rails and wheels, and greatly reduce the crane's service life. Therefore, various crane manufacturing technical specifications stipulate allowable values for wheel horizontal skew.