The Requirements
The Royal Opera House approached Hoist UK to commission a lifting system for their storage facility which is used for trial building sets, props and refurbishments. The carefully planned system required input from our design engineers to ensure maximum coverage and appropriate lifting capacities spread amongst multiple cranes for effective handling.
To ensure there were no space restrictions within the storage facility we needed to design the system to be completely in the warehouse roof with no mounted steelwork, as this would inhibit the building of large set pieces in this large work space.
The Solution
The overarching requirement for this lifting system was to provide a large scale solution that could accommodate set building in a theatrical environment. In order to achieve this we had to design a system of steelwork which was built into the existing building frame to distribute the dynamic loads from the cranes and also work within the capacity of the roof, whilst also leaving suitable steelwork members to suspend our crane tracks.
Hoist UK worked closely with the customer’s structural engineer ARUP to achieve their goal, which meant that we had to supply and install five tonnes of additional secondary steelwork to distribute the loads into
the correct areas of the roof to work with the existing portal frames.
The complete system gives them a total lifting capacity of 2520kg, spread over four independent 630kg SWL cranes with a maximum lifting height of eight metres, and covers an area of 550 square meters in their warehouse roof. All of the cranes were fitted with radio control, so that the crane operator can stand in the best and safest location for the particular lift, as items suspended from the crane can be irregular shapes and configurations due to the nature of their business.
Project Photo's
Hoist UK Comment
"We have worked with many of the county's largest theatre's and pride ourselves on being able to interpret a customers high level requirements and work with them, and in this case their structural engineer's ARUP, to design and commission a robust lifting solution that not only meets their needs but exceeds it. As always we strive to provide a safe, technically correct solution that is fit for purpose and we're delighted with the result, as are ARUP and the Royal Opera House."