AIA Recycling is a South-Korean company that recycles the steel byproduct of manufacturing in two automobile plants located in the Southeast U.S. This is new steel that can be repurposed and fed back into the manufacturing process. AIA compresses this scrap steel into bundles weighing about a ½ metric ton each. They approached Core to devise a solution for stockpiling this scrap and loading 40,000-50,000 tons at a time onto vessels for shipping back to South Korea.
To effectively and efficiently handle this type of product, we engineered 10 specialized loading pans to facilitate loading using the ship’s cranes, with all four cranes operating simultaneously. These pans are 24-feet in length and curved on the inside to properly handle the bundled steel. These pans are similar to skip pans, but we needed to devise a safe way to operate the pans with the ship’s cranes that only had one hoist line (which is not conducive for dumping traditional skip pans that require a two-line system).
The solution was to create a self-unhooking mechanism so that when the spreader bar picks up the pan and sets it down in the vessel, it is able to release on one end, allowing the scrap to be dumped as the pan is lifted back out of the vessel. This solution was a game changer because it allowed maximum productivity with all four cranes dumping pans at once. We are capable of loading vessels with 40,000-50,000 tons of scrap steel within a week using this method.