A wind turbine blade mold over 200 wheels
Find out how we transported a huge new mold, for manufacturing over-60-meter-long wind turbine blades, between Bilbao port and the ACCIONA Blades plant in Navarre
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The ACCIONA Blades plant at Lumbier, Navarre, received on 4 July the new mold it needs to manufacture the longest blades designed to date by the company. The 61.2 meter blades are to be mounted onto the rotors of its 3-MW AW 125/3000 wind turbine generators.
Behind it lay a nautical voyage of 18,000 kilometers. Loaded onto a ship in Shanghai, the mold made it by sea to the port of Bilbao in northern Spain. Then it was hauled over a complex threenight journey by road to Lumbier in the region of Navarre, home of the ACCIONA Blades plant. All in all, the operation represented a unique logistical challenge for the company.
A special road vehicle was used to transport the mold over the final 225 km from Bilbao to Lumbier, a MAN 600-horsepower cab unit drawing the load on a 200-wheel flat bed trailer.
Given that this type of freight is only authorized to move at night, the trip was allotted strict time slots and had to perform some especially complicated maneuvers. Such as at the junction of the N622 with A1 in Vitoria, where 200 meters of crash barrier and 20 road signs had to be dismantled —and reassembled immediately afterwards— for the truck and trailer to get round a 270-degree horseshoe bend.
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All was meticulously planned, though, in a job that took months to organize, involving the processing of numerous permits from the different local governments en route.
As well as the driver and four engineers accompanying the load, two support vehicles also made the trip, and two others containing Basque and Navarre police, as well as one from the corresponding motorway concession Company. A spectacular convoy, then, that left no one indifferent. A few motorists out and about during the post-midnight hours had the opportunity to contemplate the enormous load on its way.
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The truck needed three nights to make the 225 km trip from Bilbao port to the ACCIONA blades plant at Lumbier (Navarre)
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ACCIONA’s Lumbier plant has obtained orders to manufacture 84 sets of blades (252 units) for AW3000 wind turbine generators in 2014, of which 19 sets (57 units) correspond to the giant AW 125/3000 model. The ACCIONA Blades workforce in Lumbier is set to climb to over 300 by the end of July so the company can cope with rising demand.
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A very special load
- Departure point: Port of Bilbao
- Destination: ACCIONA Blades (Lumbier, Navarre)
- Truck dimensions: 68.5 m long, 4.6 m wide and 4.8 m high
- Truck weight: 120 metric tons
- Mold weight: 64.3 metric tons
- Mold length: 62 meters
- No of wheels: 200
- Power cab: 600 CV MAN
- Speed: 10-40 km/h
Team:
- 1 driver, 4 engineers
- 2 truck company support vehicles
- 1 motorway concession company support vehicle
- 1 vehicle each from Basque/Navarre police
Discover more stories like this in Experience by ACCIONA.
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