Attention all shipping

An ocean liner arrives at the City Cruise Terminal in Southampton about 60 times a year, but when it does the terminal needs to be ready for hundreds or even thousands of passengers to disembark and others to join the ship. Associated British Ports manages and maintains the terminal. Its responsibilities include ensuring that the terminal building is heated before the arrival of staff and passengers, ensuring that all areas are clean and operational and that facilties for checking in passengers and baggage are ready for action as the first passengers disembark. Playing a crucial role in this task is Carlo Gavazzi’s Dupline control networking technology to enable heating and lighting to be operated and monitored from a central location. Andy Robertson, of ABP’s electrical and mechanical team, says, ‘The arrivals hall is similar in length to the ship’s berth [300 m or more]. Even simple actions like cleaning, heating and switching on the lights can be complex and time consuming and involve the equivalent of many miles of walking. As part of ABP’s goal to continuously improve energy consumption throughout its ports, we only activate the terminal when a liner is about to arrive, so we need to accomplish these tasks quickly and efficiently.’ One of the reasons for using the Dupline system was its simple cabling requirements. The terminal building is some 400 m long, and the complete fieldbus infrastructure could easily involve several miles of cabling and be a lengthy and complex project. The Dupline fieldbus is a 2-wire system that supports a multiplexed network topology over any 2-core cables. It also supports long transmission distances, reducing requirements for equipment such as repeaters. The Dupline range includes a wide range of sensors for temperature, water level, motion or daylight.

Related links:

• www.gavazzi-automation.com

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