These six nominees beat the field to make it to our select list of finalists in the 2013 PACE Zenith Transport, Power & Infrastructure Awards.
APC Integration
Common pump station design delivers benefits to six Councils in South Australia
Following identification of the need to improve maintenance standards and ensure regulatory compliance of community wastewater management systems, a group of six local councils in the South East of the State agreed to conduct a pilot study to assess the benefit of an across-Council's joint service arrangement.
There existed different switchgear and ways of operation between the various council wastewater systems and there was an obvious need to improve compliance and upgrade emergency communications systems.
APC Integration, was commissioned to create a common design and standard for all community wastewater management systems across the respective council regions.
Common hardware would result in bulk purchasing discounts, reduced spares, simplified maintenance and reduced training for staff.
A unique aspect of this project was designing a system that could be used by six different councils with shared resources while controlling how much of the data can be shared between councils.
This was a tricky political situation, and the solution was to avoid storing data at any of the council depots and instead use a 'cloud' based design.
Once fully implemented, this pilot project is likely to provide a strong impetus for promotion of the model to other regions across the state, as well as potentially to other regions across Australia.
AGL and Yokogawa Australia
AGL Loy Yang Integrated Control and Monitoring System Upgrade Unit 1 and 2
The project focused on the replacement of AGL Loy Yang’s Instrumentation and Control Systems to the Yokogawa Distributed Control Systems CS3000, Centum VP and the Safety System, ProSafe.
Unit 2 530 MW Turbine/Generator Instrumentation and Controls were upgraded to the CS3000 and the ProSafe in September 2011. In November 2012 the CS3000 software was upgraded to VP (Vigilant Plant) software to bring the Unit up to the latest technology.
Unit 1 570 MW Turbine/Generator Instrumentation and Controls were upgraded to the Centum VP, ProSafe and Turbo machinery module in September 2012.
The transitions of both Units were performed during AGL Loy Yang’s Major Outage maintenance periods. With the maintenance outages having a defined period off line, the control system upgrades were achieved during the outages and met all milestones and contractual obligations.
Enerpac
Navy’s largest ships hoisted and positioned accurately
A high precision Enerpac SyncHoist system has been successfully deployed by heavy lift and transport specialists Universal Cranes to ensure optimum accuracy and safety in the hoisting and positioning of key components of one of the largest ships ever built for the Royal Australian Navy.
The Enerpac System – deployed by Universal Cranes for the Landing Helicopter Deck (LHD) vessel project under way at Williamstown, Victoria – is being introduced to Australasia to enhance crane performance and safety in diverse heavy lift projects including construction, engineering, hydraulics, mining and energy, oil and gas, manufacturing and metal fabrication, shipbuilding and safety.
Universal Cranes integrated the system with a 600 tonne crawler crane as part of the project management and engineering for the consolidation of steel blocks of between 164-300 tonnes on the deck of the first of the LHD vessels being built by BAE Systems Australia.
The four steel blocks, with variable centres of gravity, will become the operating control towers on the flight deck of the Canberra class LHD, one of two 28,000 tonne LHD vessels that will come into service in 2014 (HMAS Canberra) and 2015 (HMAS Adelaide) respectively.
Braendler Engineering
Aether Asset Inspection Service
The Aether Inspection Service has been developed to provide a safe and reliable method for inspecting the surfaces of large scale infrastructure assets such as cooling towers, chimneys and blades of wind turbines.
These infrastructure assets must be routinely inspected to reduce unscheduled maintenance. The Service was launched in Australia in 2012 and will be available in Europe the second half of this year.
Traditionally, there is no easy way of capturing a high quality visual record of the surface of these assets. The standard approach is to employ rope, crane or scaffold based teams to scale the asset and photograph potential defects.
The resulting pictures from these inspections are usually incomplete and reliant on the human eye and the conditions on the day. In addition, this practice is risky and teams can only operate effectively in benign weather conditions.
The Aether service comprises an engineered Image Capture Platform and supporting software management tools for image processing and analysis.
Both the Imaging Platform and the software interface have been developed in-house by Braendler’s team of electrical, mechanical and software engineers and drawing on years of experience in developing vision inspection and reporting systems for use in high speed manufacturing environments.
SolarOne Marketing
FrontLiner
The project was created following requests from a number of mining companies that had become aware of the SolarOne pathway products, hoping that the core technology may be adapted to meet their haulage road collision avoidance needs.
The aim was to create a sustainably powered, roadside device that could be used in mines in such a manner that an array, placed along side the haulage roads, could provide a delineated driving area as well as warn of hazards, corners, dips.
The lights had to be visible from the cabin of a large haulage truck, much the same as landing lights on an airfield would be visible to a pilot.
They had to be able to be seen from a distance of at least 500 meters. They must be 100% reliable and turn on at dusk and off at dawn.
There should be no requirement to service them for many months, preferably years. They must quickly absorb sunlight and store it, in such a manner that electricity would always be available to provide the guidance required.
A final field trial was then conducted that was run for six months after which it was determined that the product met the design specification.
ICON Technologies
Curtin University GEEP Laboratory Data Management System
ICON Technologies engineered a data acquisition and distribution system for the GEEP Laboratory at the Curtin University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The laboratory is a multi-use facility for graduate, postgraduate and industry researchers, together with undergraduate students and teaching staff. It is used for the research of different renewable energy sources with a commercial scale power management and micro-grid infrastructure.
The operational and technical functions of the facility is managed by the GEEP Laboratory Data Management System. The system needed to provide unrestricted 24/7 access to all real-time and historical data for researchers, and limited but flexible access to real-time and historical data for students.
Any researcher sitting at any workstation needed to be access real-time and historical data from any combination of renewable energy sources.
The system also needed to provide multiple levels of remote access so that staff could have full operational access to the system from a remote location, while various subsets of data could be made available over the Internet to various industry groups.
The solution comprised of a Windows 7 server PC, client PCs as required, three NI CompactRIO PAC Controllers to acquire point and waveform current/voltage data at selected system points, and to handle ancillary IO as required; and a MOXA serial interface to integrate the site weather station.
The custom system application software was developed in LabVIEW 2011. When completed, the GEEP Laboratory Data Management System was capable of handling mixed static and waveform signals at acquisition rates from 1 sample/s to 5,000 samples/s, together with serial and network data, in a single seamless system.