How to measure wind speed remotely on mobile cranes and crawlers?

When using measuring wind speed with an anemometer on a tower crane, it is pretty simple, you have a fix length boom or jib so running the cable from the tip or the A frame back to the cabin shouldn’t be a complex setup.

Things change a fair bit when installing it on a mobile crane and crawlers where the boom can be extended and contracted. Usually the sensors at the end of the boom are CAN BUS and use a reel cable for keeping the cable organised, this is quite typical. The challenge is how do you access the wind information from those sensors remotely? How do you send to your customers weekly wind reports on wind loads?

There’re probably more ways to solve this than the one we explain here. However we found this one to be quite simple and straightforward for installer that may not have a lot of experience installing wind equipment. We use a small version of the WINDCRANE mini, which is an IP67 high impact tough enclosure. This unit is able to be powered with 24Vdc which is usually the nominal battery voltage of most of the mobile cranes and crawlers. The wind monitoring device is installed at the top of the boom and powered in parallel with the air traffic warning lights. One word of caution! Not all wind data loggers are designed the same, in the case of the WINDCRANE system, the energy usage of the unit is extremely low, it hardly uses 4mA on average and most of the time it is just consuming fiddling much lower than that. What this means is that the WINDCRANE system hardly uses any battery from the crane when operating, even on a 3G connection.

The technical design of the WINCRANE design is extremely energy efficient and probably is the lowest power consumption remote 3G data logger on the market that is able to keep a live connection while consuming so little.

In terms of installation, the WINDCRANE unit is within a few meters distance from the top of the boom and any anemometer can be connected to it, for best results we always recommend to mount the anemometer on a pendulum attachment.

The result is pretty amazing, as soon as the crane is in operation, live wind speed data starts to stream to the WINDCRANE platform and fleet management portal where it can be supervised for wind thresholds and alerts, but also shared with customers. This is specially useful when in certain projects, customer would like to see the wind speed recorded during the working hours of the crane. In this case all is done automatically so there’s no need for operator intervention, saving worries, and a lot of man hours.

We know every crane out there is different, and for this reason we always encourage crane operators, hire companies and even developers and construction companies to contact us before buying any system. We promise to always give honest and truthful feedback on measuring wind, since we have been doing it since 2007 for the wind energy industry.