Lifting and handling equipment for aluminium producers.

Aluminium production puts some of the most demanding requirements on lifting equipment of any primary metals sector. Continuous billet casting produces parts at temperatures that vaporise standard lubricants, warp painted finishes and strip grip off conventional jaw designs. Throughput is relentless, safety margins are unforgiving and the consequence of a dropped billet in a casting hall is measured in hours of lost production.

Where Somers equipment is specified

Somers Handling has supplied billet lifting beams, billet tongs and bespoke handling equipment into primary aluminium producers — including the coordinated family of beams shipped recently to one of the world’s largest premium aluminium facilities in the Middle East — as well as specialist-steel mills running adjacent hot-line applications in Sweden.

The recurring themes in these projects:

• Hot-line material and coating choice. Carbon structural steel loses around 10% of its yield strength by 400 °C and significantly more by 500 °C. For continuous contact at 650 °C+ we move to creep-resistant alloys, 316 stainless or refractory-shielded loadpaths — or all three.
• Thermal expansion in the design envelope. Billets expand, jaws expand, structure expands. Getting the thermal case wrong turns a correctly-clamping tong at ambient into one that over-grips or loses grip when hot.
• Family-of-beams thinking. Rather than one bespoke beam per billet size, we design a coordinated range sharing rigging geometry and safety features so crane operators move between billet sizes without changing their physical behaviour on the crane controls.
• Serviceability as a design driver. High-cycle aluminium lines can’t tolerate long repair windows. Key wear parts are positioned for quick replacement during routine maintenance.

Complementary services

Every piece of equipment we supply into the aluminium sector comes with the full LOLER-ready documentation pack — declaration of conformity, proof-load test certificate, material certificates and O&M documentation — and is backed by our UK repairs, servicing and modernisation service for ongoing statutory examinations and planned maintenance.