The family company was founded in 1932, and is one of the oldest machine construction companies in the Vorarlberg region of Austria.

There are approximately 280 employees at four locations in Europe and the USA.

In the crane construction sector, the company specializes in the planning, manufacture and commissioning of container cranes, automatic electrolysis cranes, and special cranes.

Künz processes approx. 8,000 tons of steel annually

High processing speeds of the crane systems up to 200 m/min (own weight approx. 80 t)

A precision of +/- 2 mm represents a decisive quality criterion especially for electrolytic metallurgy

Extreme ambient conditions in the electrolysis plants, e.g. due to the high acid concentration in the air, necessitate:

Maximum quality of the technologies used

Complete automation with minimized use of personnel

The various danger areas necessitate a safe emergency stop function from the shop floor to the crane

Trouble-free radio communication is achieved using the rugged access points and clients from the SCALANCE W range

Wireless transmission of the safety-related Profisafe protocol over Profinet by means of two radio systems of redundant design operating in the 2.5 and/or 5 GHz band

The automation system for the crane has a distributed design – the fail-safe CPU from the Simatic S7-300 range controls the ET200-S I/O stations connected via fiber-optic cables on the crane

The standard I/O modules include fail-safe emergency stop modules

Reliable transmission of Ethernet via radio

Additional radio links for the emergency stop transmission are unnecessary