Rotor to Antwerp via Brussels
Two companies headquartered in the port of Antwerp, where the European heavylift and project cargo industry meeting takes place in May every year, recently handled an extraordinary transport job that transited the Belgian capital’s airport.
The two companies Maintenance Partners and Silvertrans joined forces recently to ship a EUR 10 million turbo-generator rotor from India to Belgium. The transport had to be carried out as the generator’s rotor was damaged, and Zwijndrecht-based Maintenance Partners has the expertise to carry out the electro-technical repairs.
Eddy Buysse, Maintenance Partners’ technical director, explained that «this is a unique project in which we can demonstrate our expertise in the field of electric repairs.» He added that the order gives Maintenance Partners and Silvertrans as well as Brussels airport the ability to demonstrate their expertise in the handling of outsized cargo consignments.
Flexible airport procedures
The turbine is 11 m long and has a diameter of 3 m. The rotor is part of a generator used for power generation in the Middle East and the 47 t cargo was shipped from India to Belgium on a Ukrainian Antonov AN-124 cargo carrier. Once it arrived in Brussels on a rainy November night it was quickly unloaded by staff of the Russian airline Polet. Thanks to the flexible procedures in place at Brussels airport the generator rotor, as any other type of oversized cargo, was handled easily and thence transported to its final destination – Maintenance Partners’s workshop in Zwijndrecht. There a team of specialists and engineers started work on repairing the rotor. The task will continue for 24 hours a day, seven days a week for more than ten weeks.
Maintenance Partners was created in 2001, after a management buy-out from the ABB Service Group was completed. Almost five years ago Mitsubishi Heavy Industries took over the enterprise, headquartered in the greater Antwerp region.