Demag DRS Wheel Block in Manila Port Case

As the largest comprehensive port in the Philippines, Manila Port handles over 70% of the country’s import and export cargo transshipment. In 2022, the port’s Terminal 3 faced severe challenges: its existing lifting equipment, which had been in service for more than 15 years, frequently suffered shutdown failures due to wheel block wear and insufficient load-bearing capacity, resulting in economic losses.

Three Major Operational Challenges at Manila Port

The operating environment of Manila Port’s Terminal 3 imposes stricter requirements on crane wheel blocks than ordinary scenarios. The shortcomings of the original equipment are concentrated in three aspects:

Accelerated Wear from High Salt Spray Corrosion: Located in a tropical marine climate zone, the port has an average annual humidity of 85%. The high-salt mist air evaporated from the sea continuously erodes metal components. The original crane wheel blocks lacked specialized anti-corrosion treatment, requiring wheel body replacement every 6 months on average, leading to high maintenance costs.

Frequent Shutdowns Due to Heavy Load Impact: The terminal mainly handles the export of local Philippine minerals and agricultural products, as well as the import of industrial equipment. The weight of a single container often reaches 40-60 tons. The load impact during crane start-up and shutdown frequently damaged the bearings of the original wheel blocks, resulting in 12 emergency shutdowns due to bearing jamming in 2021 alone.

Stability Tests Under High-Frequency Operations: As a key transshipment hub in Southeast Asia, the port’s cranes operate for over 18 hours per day on average. The original wheel blocks had a low degree of modularization, requiring the disassembly of multiple associated components for replacement. A single maintenance session took over 6 hours, seriously affecting cargo turnover efficiency.

Solutions

Targeting the special working conditions of Manila Port, DEMAG equipped the customized cranes with exclusively optimized DRS wheel blocks, achieving precise adaptation from three core dimensions: material, structure, and protection.

Material Upgrade for Salt Spray Resistance and High Load-Bearing CapacityThe DRS wheel block housing is made of GGG 70 high-toughness ductile iron specially customized for Philippine ports. After precision casting and double aging treatment, its impact toughness is increased to 18J/cm², easily withstanding the instantaneous load impact when lifting 40-ton cargo. The wheel body is made of GGG 70 high-alloy wear-resistant material. Through a dual heat treatment process of "quenching and carburizing", the surface hardness reaches HRC 52. Additionally, targeting the port’s salt spray environment, an additional double-layer ceramic composite coating is applied, achieving 1000 hours of rust-free performance in salt spray tests—three times the anti-corrosion performance of the original wheel blocks.

Sealing Enhancement for High Humidity and Dust EnvironmentsAddressing Manila Port’s high humidity and dusty operating environment, the DRS wheel block adopts a dual protection structure of "lip seal + labyrinth seal", with 3 sealing barriers set at the connection between the bearing and the wheel body. This effectively blocks salt spray moisture, ore dust, and debris generated during loading and unloading operations from entering the bearing interior. Meanwhile, the bearings use high-temperature grease suitable for tropical climates, maintaining stable lubrication performance even at 45℃, completely solving the frequent bearing jamming problem of the original wheel blocks.

Modular Design for Rapid MaintenanceThe DRS wheel block features a five-sided precision-machined connection surface design, enabling "plug-and-play" quick docking with the DEMAG crane’s traveling mechanism. Installation time is reduced from 6 hours (for the original wheel blocks) to 1.5 hours. More importantly, the wheel block achieves component-level independent replacement. When the wheel body is worn, there is no need to disassemble the crane’s traveling mechanism—replacement can be completed by removing the fixing bolts with special tools, controlling a single maintenance session within 2 hours, significantly reducing the impact of downtime.

The Manila Port case fully demonstrates that the DEMAG DRS wheel block has strong adaptability to industrial scenarios in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries: its high salt spray anti-corrosion design is suitable for tropical marine climates, its heavy-load material selection meets the needs of transshipping heavy cargo such as minerals and industrial equipment, and its modular maintenance design adapts to the high operational efficiency requirements of Southeast Asian ports.