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5/5/99
On Campus: Researchers bring 'black boxes' from planes to
cranes
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Staff Photo By Chuck Liddy DOT
crane operator James Blalock operates a crane being used to
test a new monitoring system.
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• Footnotes
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University
people
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By NED GLASCOCK, Staff Writer
RALEIGH -- An airplane crashes. Investigators seek vital clues to
what went wrong in the flight's final moments. Where do they look?
The aircraft's "black box" flight recorder.
If that technology is good enough for
planes, it's good enough for cranes, say researchers at N.C. State
University.
In one of NCSU's trademark
efforts to apply research to solving the practical problems of
industry, professors have teamed with state transportation officials
and a small Cary company to make construction sites safer.
The team is developing a product called
Blackbox Technology that monitors the movements of construction
cranes to warn of impending danger, while simultaneously recording
data so that accidents can be analyzed to avoid similar mistakes in
the future.
Crane accidents are a
serious business. When a long-armed boom snaps, heavy loads can fall
to earth and industrial-strength cables can whiplash. Cranes can tip
over, damaging property and sometimes claiming lives. At least four
people have died in North Carolina in crane accidents since 1994,
including a construction worker who was crushed in January 1997 when
a 35-ton crane lifting a chimney frame fell into a house under
construction in Wake County.
"There are
accidents every day, every week, across the nation with cranes,"
says Leonhard Bernold, an associate professor of civil engineering
at NCSU, who helped develop the device at the university's
Construction Automation and Robotics Laboratory in the civil
engineering department.
A patent is
pending on Blackbox Technology, and months of field testing lie
ahead. But Bernold and his partners envision enormous potential for
their product in the multimillion-dollar marketplace for heavy
equipment in the construction industry and other fields -- perhaps
even in large-scale mining operations.
"This can be applied to anything in construction, and that's so huge
[a market] no one can put a number on it," says Scott Elliott, a
1985 NCSU graduate whose company, Elliott Technologies Inc., helped
build the apparatus.
While some newer
construction cranes come equipped with certain monitoring devices --
such as a tool for warning against lifting a load that is too heavy
-- the developers of Blackbox Technology say they've come up with
some unique innovations.
Among them is
a way to warn crane operators when they're exceeding their machines'
design capabilities. In other words, doing something they shouldn't.
In essence, a crane is designed to lift
heavy objects vertically -- straight up and down. But in the real
world, crane operators sometimes have to work at odd angles. They
drag steel beams or stacks of concrete block. They pull up tree
stumps. Sometimes the cranes can't handle the stress, but their
operators have little way of knowing they're reaching the limit.
With the Blackbox Technology package,
an array of electronic sensors is strategically strung about the
crane, along its boom arm and on the heavy-duty cable that extends
from it.
If the cable swings out at an
angle, the sensors signal the computerized brains of Blackbox -- a
gray and black metal box the size of a student's lunch box --
installed beside the crane operator. Then Blackbox sounds a warning
siren, and, if the danger is deemed critical, it triggers a shutdown
of the crane. The same thing happens if the crane's load is too
heavy or the machine begins to tip to one side.
The Blackbox project got under way
about five years ago, when officials with the N.C. Department of
Transportation grew concerned about a series of mishaps with
state-owned cranes. Repairing a telescoping arm on a truck-mounted
crane can cost $20,000, not including lost time on the job, Bernold
says.
Using a $35,000 grant from DOT,
Bernold came up with several prototypes designed to issue warnings
and to record a crane's movements. He worked with Steven Lorenc, the
laboratory's associate director of technology development.
However, the prototype used cables
draped from the boom and connected to a laptop computer -- a setup
that could never stand the rigors of a construction site. So, armed
with a second DOT grant of about $38,000, Bernold decided to build a
version for the real world.
Searching
for a partner, the professor found Elliott Technologies, a
10-employee outfit dedicated to product development, test
engineering and software development, among other things. Together,
they built Blackbox Technology.
The
device will be tested on two DOT cranes to work out any kinks and
make refinements.
Ultimately, Elliott
hopes to sell the rights to Blackbox to a construction-equipment
manufacturer, with proceeds to be split with the NCSU team. The
devices would sell for $6,000 to $8,000 each.
"If this box saves one accident from
happening," Bernold says, "it has paid for itself three times over."
Ned Glascock can be
reached at 829-4557 or nedg@nando.com
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