Heavy lifting: How Irish forklift firm Combilift developed technology for moving giant turbine blades

Located just a few kilometres from the border with Northen Ireland, Monaghan-based forklift manufacturer Combilift has had to move with the times. The company started business in 1998 – the same year the Good Friday Agreement was signed – and over the past quarter century has grown to employ big numbers from both sides of the divide. 

“About 100 of our employees would be living in Northern Ireland, travelling across the border to Monaghan,” Martin McVicar, Combilift CEO, told The Engineer.

As with most manufacturers, Brexit has created headaches. But the nature of the UK’s deal with the EU and the importance placed on maintaining an open Irish border has meant Combilift has continued to thrive. In fact, it was the earlier global financial crisis that helped lay the foundations for the company’s success today.

Martin McVicar- CEO, Combilift CEO

“We were hit, like many manufacturing companies, in the downturn in 08/09,” said McVicar.  “But with our investment in product development and R&D, we’ve been continually growing the business by bringing new product offerings to the marketplace”

Having built expertise in multidirectional, sideloading and articulated forklifts and loaders, McVicar and his team saw how that knowledge could be applied to other, bigger types of cargo handling. Much bigger. Combilift solutions are now being used by leading wind energy firms to help transport and manoeuvre some of the world’s largest turbine blades – enormous, high-performance components that take ‘handle with care’ to new heights.

“We’ve been collaborating with a number of the major offshore manufacturers, such as Vestas and Siemens” said McVicar. “We started manufacturing mobile gantry cranes for moving these blades, and then probably through that interaction we’ve been getting more involved with the development in offshore.

“Onshore blades have been getting bigger, but offshore, they’re at a different scale. And there’s been no product offering out there designed for handling that industry…no bespoke products made for handling really long and heavy blades.”

The Combi SC (Straddle Carrier) is a gantry crane lifter on four multidirectional wheels that can safely transport loads up to 150,000kg, making it suitable for smaller onshore blades. But with commercial offshore wind turbines moving towards 15MW (and prototypes in the Chinese market pushing beyond 20MW), the blades are getting mind-bogglingly big as well. Moving these massive blades, many of which are now in excess off 100m, requires an entirely new approach.

Tapping into its 25 years of experience, Combilift developed the Combi-LC Blade, a bespoke solution for handling this new generation of megablades. Siemens Gamesa’s 15MW SG 14-222 DD turbine, for example, features blades of 108m. Rather than a single mobile crane gantry, structures this big need to be lifted at both ends, with two specialised handling vehicles operating in tandem.

“We’ve developed this load carrier,” McVicar explained. “It’s based on a triangle mechanism where we can lift the root of a blade and transfer the weight back to the centre of our vehicle. If you take a traditional way of lifting something, like a forklift truck, it’s like a counterweight. We’ve brought the weight back to the middle.

“We’ve one unit picking up the root end of the blade. We’ve another picking up the tip end. And we synchronise the driving and the steering…so it’s not just the experience of mechanical engineers, it’s very much mechatronics, where we’re bringing mechanical and electrical all together in the vehicle.”

The two vehicles that form the tandem Combi-LC Blade system are broadly similar but with subtle differences. Both feature 12 multidirectional wheels beneath a flatbed, enabling precise control and movement in any direction. The ‘root end’ vehicle has a heavy-duty forklift mechanism that attaches to the frame around the blade’s base. This lifts the blade root off the ground, then retracts back to the vehicle’s flatbed to centre the weight on to the vehicle, minimising blade stress.

At the other end of the blade – often more than 100m away – the ‘tip-end’ vehicle has a flatbed with a clamping mechanism on top. Designed in-house by Combilift, the mechanism can be raised and lowered several feet, all the while holding the tip of the blade firmly in place.

“When we’re travelling, we’re not putting the blade under any stress,” said McVicar. “We’re synchronising the driving. One remote control is operating the two units from a travel perspective, so they travel at equal speed with the product.

“The blade - it’s fiberglass, it’s a strong structure, but the last thing a customer wants to do is stress the blade during transit.”

Moving blades around manufacturing plants and ports often involves traversing some fairly unforgiving terrain. These industrial areas were not designed with the delicate transfer of multimillion dollar, 100m-plus structures in mind. To help smooth the transit, Combilift’s 12-wheeler handlers have suspension across all wheels to compliment the steering. 

“Some of these areas, they’re not heavy depth of concrete,” said McVicar. “Because of that, we designed a vehicle based on 12 wheels. There’s suspension on all wheels, so it can drive on semi-rough terrain, as long as it’s compact.”

The Combi-LC Blade system is already in place at the Port of Hull, serving North Sea wind farms, as well as ports in Denmark, France, Taiwan and the Port of Virginia in the US. With more than 1TW of new wind expected to come online globally by 2030, that’s an awful lot of blades that need to be moved from plant to port. Combilift has designs on being at the forefront of the global wind rollout.

“We want to become known as the go-to provider for anyone moving blades, whether it’s in a manufacturing plant or at a port,” said McVicar.

“We had meetings with Siemens Gamesa at their sites in Denmark, Alborg. We’ve had their teams across here during the product development. So it was very much a customer led development and we were listening to what their needs were, finding solutions around their challenge and developing a product around that.

“That order that that we’ve had with Siemens (for Taiwan), that’s in excess of a €12 million order. And for us, it’s just a stepping stone into this offshore sector.”

Since its inception 25 years ago, Combilift has shipped more than 85,000 handling vehicles of different stripes and now turns over more than €500m annually. The company is scheduled to celebrate its half century just a couple of years before the UK’s net zero date of 2050, by which time the world will hopefully be approaching net zero. If Combilift can tap into even a fraction of the offshore wind market over that time, the future for the company looks bright.

“We focus on niche markets and develop a product that’s a solution for that niche market,” said McVicar. “And of course, the offshore or onshore - it’s a niche, but it’s still a big niche.”