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Plug & Play

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Vierarmen Tunnel – Belgium, is a 540 metres long tunnel which underwent a massive relighting project of more than 1,400 light modules. Advanced Automation was also implemented to enable remote operation and monitoring of the new LED tunnel lighting.

By replacing the old fluorescent and sodium lights with LEDs, the primary objective is to achieve energy savings. The longer service life of LED lights also means less maintenance is required, which translates to less holdups for road users.

Every effort was made to minimise inconvenience caused by the lighting replacement. The replacement work was completed in 45 nights per tunnel shaft, all thanks to the advance preparation and the simplicity of the plug-and-play system.

Good Collaboration

The replacement of the lighting in the Vierarmen Tunnel was carried out by the VSE – ENGIE Fabricom joint venture. Lighting systems from the Belgian manufacturer Schréder were selected.

Phoenix Contact supplied the Tunnel Control System and dealt with the implementation of the plug & play concept. Lastly, Tein Technology was the supplier of the central operating and monitoring system of the Flemish tunnels in the control room.

Every aspect of the installation was optimally coordinated to finally arrive at a reliable solution and to permit the installation of the system to occur smoothly and efficiently.

Minimum Energy and Maintenance

At the entrance to the tunnel, 300 candela per square metre is required. This entrance luminance is achieved by means of TAG lighting equipment.

Steven Hulpiau: “Because the light fittings can only be positioned on the side wall of the tunnel in this case, we are using special lenses that scatter the light beams to the side. In this way we can guarantee the required brightness everywhere in the tunnel with a minimum of energy. An additional saving arises from the fact that the lights can be dimmed.”

The electronics that control the lighting and that are normally located in the light fittings were in separate “driver boxes” installed right next to the light fittings. The advantage of this is that the light fittings do not have to be opened if maintenance needs to be performed on the electronics later.

Tunnel Control System

Tunnel Control System from Phoenix Contact is the beating heart, which consists of a controller, I/Os and communication modules that are used worldwide in tunnel projects.

The electronic control of the lighting makes a whole range of options and scenarios possible. To start with, there is the difference between daytime and night-time mode with lights that can be dimmed or switched off at night. The brightness control considers the sensors for measuring the luminance at both entrances to the tunnel. The aim is to guarantee sufficiently bright lighting with as little energy consumption as possible.

Plug & Play

For the new lighting installation to be carried out smoothly, various parties on the project collaborated on a plug & play concept.

Phoenix Contact’s QPD connectors were selected for the data network and the supply to the driver boxes and light fittings. Every cable in the tunnel project was custom prefabricated in advance, equipped with the required connectors and labelled.

The aim of this is not only to save time but also to increase the success rate during installation, which is, at its core, once more a matter of saving time. Compared with the traditional connection method, the use of the QPD connectors achieved a time saving of 75% during installation, and up to 15% of the total installation time in the tunnel.

Thanks to the seamless cooperation between the various parties and the consistent application of plug & play principles, the relighting project for the Vierarmen Tunnel was completed in a smooth and efficient manner. A sustainable, technologically high-quality solution was implemented with minimal inconvenience. Good lighting in tunnels is an essential aspect in guaranteeing the convenience and safety of road users.

Embracing Technology Towards Smart Manufacturing

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The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is predicted to become the fourth-largest economy in the world by 2030, after the United States, China, and the European Union. The regional development is pushed by a growing educated and young workforce, coupled with a jump in manufacturing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) across ASEAN member countries.

Against the backdrop of this shift in production capacity to this region, governments in ASEAN are encouraging the adoption of 4th Industrial Revolution technologies (e.g. industrial robots, artificial intelligence, data analytics) through various initiatives to support producers of relevant technologies.

Our Machine Building Heritage

Since 1968, Phoenix Contact has been operating an in-house machine building department at Blomberg to maintain our independence from service providers. Today, this department of 260 employees provides support for all developmental and manufacturing business units worldwide. The service portfolio has started to shift from creating manually operated equipment to complex production systems. We are, therefore, very familiar with your daily challenges in this transformation process.

Robust solution to avoid costly downtimes

Tapping into the experience gained from the past decades, the following points have been identified when developing machines for our own production facilities:

Machine Safety – Safety technology is paramount in machine building. It prevents operating staff from being put at risk or damage being caused to the machine. Phoenix Contact’s comprehensive portfolio ranges from non-contact safety switches and safety relay modules to network-capable safety solutions. All our products are very easy to install and configure. This allows you to benefit from the fast and cost-effective implementation of safety-related applications.

System Reliability & Availability – There is nothing costlier than having a machine that is down. Downtimes ultimately lead to production losses and incur extremely high costs. This makes machine availability the top priority. Reliable components and high machine availability are crucial in preventing downtimes and production losses.

Ease of Installation & Servicing – Today’s machines must be able to quickly adapt to changes in the market. A modular machine concept guarantees maximum possible flexibility, while optimally coordinated product solutions are the key to keeping machine manufacturing costs as low as possible.

Utilising components with universal accessories allow a significant reduction of parts and lowering of storage costs. Such standardization simplifies start-up and maintenance for your installation engineers and service technicians.

Reliable Data Acquisition through Cloud

To maintain the competitive edge in the market, processes must be as efficient as possible and continuously improved. Decisions regarding the optimization of machines and production processes are made based on machine and system data.

The collection and evaluation of values such as flow rates, currents, or temperatures allows predictive maintenance to be carried out, thereby improving machine performance and reducing machine downtimes.

Your technology partner towards Smart Manufacturing

Making the Global Reach – Enhancing the value proposition further, the data collected can be pre‑evaluated using a PLCnext Control device and easily transferred to the Cloud. This means that you have an overview of your machine data anytime, anywhere, for optimum machine utilization and availability.

Safety in Tunnel Applications

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Commuting each morning via the 12km road tunnel during peak hours, it only takes a little more than 15 minutes to reach my destination from home. It is difficult to imagine thousands of cars passing through each day without hearing many accidents being reported on the news. However, when calamity arises, it is then clear that the safety systems have been put in place, ensuring the safety of road users at all times.

Have you ever wondered what is going on behind the scenes?

The road tunnels are designed in accordance with directives which specifying the minimum safety requirements. Aside from the emergency exits and emergency telephones available at regular intervals, it is paramount that the tunnels must always be supplied with power, light, fresh air and water for firefighting.

Take the ventilation system for example. It helps to remove toxic gases when the NOx, CO or CO2 levels are detected to be high during normal operations. In the case of a fire, the operator depends on the same system to purge the smoke and heat from the tunnel, away from motorists evacuating the tunnel or the emergency response team that is tackling the disaster.

To minimise potential casualties, Phoenix Contact has developed the Dynamic Evacuation Guidance (D.E.G). The automated D.E.G comprises of a full redundant configuration, where the guiding handrail is monitored by a pair of redundant PLC to guarantee maximum availability. Together with its 2-hour phosphorescence effect on the guiding handrail, the worst-case scenario during a loss of electrical power is also mitigated.

It is equally important to note that all state-of-the-art safety systems will not be operating at its best without a reliable communication network. The integrated backbone communication network is typically setup in several redundancy levels. At “switching level”, the entire tunnels are segregated into various “zones” covering certain sections of the tunnel. These “zones” are then grouped together through the “routing level”. With this structure, network failure (should it ever occur) can be isolated, without affecting other parts of the communication network.

Solutions for the Transport Industry

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The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with its 10 member countries has a combined population of over 640 Million people and a market of US$2.8 trillion as of year 2017. Collectively, this is the third largest economy in Asia and the seventh largest in the world. Over the last decade, ASEAN GDP growth averaged at 5.4%, higher than the global GDP growth of 3.6%. It is forecasted that ASEAN will emerge as the world’s fourth largest economy by year 2030.

To support the fast growing economies in ASEAN, it is not difficult to notice the development projects in the area of Transport, Power and Water & Waste-water.

Taking the transport industry for example, urbanisation has driven populations in Southeast Asian cities to swelling points, averaging between 1 million inhabitants (e.g. Da Nang) and up to 10 million inhabitants (e.g. Jakarta). This has posed a huge challenge to city municipals when traffic gridlocks bring businesses and daily life to a standstill, resulting in huge economic losses.

To tackle this problem, public mass transport systems (i.e. Monorail, Metro) have been put into city planning. Improvement works to road infrastructure has been carried out, with new highways and road tunnels being planned and built.

Contributing to road tunnel safety, Phoenix Contact has developed the Advanced Tunnel Solution (ATS) for Tunnel Lighting control. Depending on the external ambient light condition, the controllers adjust the light intensity with precision through dimming, to attain the ideal illumination for the tunnel zones illustrated above. This “demand oriented” solution provides significant energy savings when compared with the conventional solution we see today, enabling energy efficiency and reducing carbon footprint.

To enhance the speed of deployment onsite, the installation-ready control cabinet solutions (BTS, ATS, TCS) only require simple configuration of the system, without the need for any tedious programming work.

While cable installation and system connectivity is dubbed as the most labour intensive, the versatile and robust QPD installation system with its tried-and-tested QUICKON fast connection technology, allows for effortless distribution of power and data signal.

Looking through the wide range of reliable and excellent quality products portfolio (e.g. Surge protection, Industrial networking, Firewall for Cyber Security), Phoenix Contact constantly strives to develop new innovative industry solutions, to fuel the regional growth in our own ways.

Want to find out more? Feel free to contact us at marketing@phoenixcontact.com.sg!

Hannover Messe 2019

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Hannover Messe is truly the centre of the global industrial community. In the month of April, the city of Hannover sees hundreds of thousands of visitors congregating. Leading solution providers and manufacturers often take this event as an opportunity to showcase their innovation in new applications and products. This year, we can still see, undoubtedly, the continuous hype around the initiative of Industry 4.0, and the unwavering push towards its adoption around the world.

What exactly is Industry 4.0?

One might explain this as an industrial revolution where:

  1. A higher level of “Interconnectivity” is necessary with security implemented
  2. There is a need to create a digital twin through “Digitalization”, sharing digital information along the entire process
  3. There is smart system intelligence to allow “Decentralized Decision”

At Phoenix Contact, the COMPLETE Line System, for example, provides control cabinet manufacturers a holistic digitalized solution to plan and visualise their cabinet design and concept, before it goes into production. This will account for an optimized engineering process and improve productivity.

The highly celebrated PLCnext Technology Ecosystem takes automation into a whole new dimension. In collaboration with the ever increasing community of innovators, a digital marketplace has been launched, featuring purpose built-applications for automation, and software libraries to help accelerate PLC programming.

Taking advantage of the PLCnext hardware performance and open software system structure, PLCnext Technology will be a cornerstone for digitalized automation. The digital data can be upload to Phoenix Contact Proficloud, that provides the much needed visualisation (i.e.: augmented reality) across different stake holders of the organization.

Aside from the embrace of new technologies like IIoT, Cloud Computing, Augmented Reality which aid the transformation from the technological perspective, what about the enhancement of operational processes and the skill development the workforce within the organisation?

The Economic Development Board (EDB) of Singapore has launched the “Smart Industry Readiness Index (SIRI)” and its accompanying Assessment Matrix / Prioritisation Matrix, to provide companies a self-diagnostic tool to assess their readiness and architect roadmap towards this digital transformation.

Source: EDB Singapore

As seen from the above overview, SIRI provides the industry with a much needed guideline that identifies the 3 fundamental building blocks of Industry 4.0, namely: Technology, Process and Organisation.

These building blocks are then sub-categorised into 8 key pillars that represent the critical aspects which the company needs to focus on and subsequently into 16 different dimensions of assessment. The implementing company can then use these tools to evaluate their facility readiness, benchmarking their scores against others in the industry and finally plan and prioritise their implementation.

Interested to find out more? Get in touch with us at marketing@phoenixcontact.com.sg!