WAGO 750 I/O System is used for load management on the Norwegian excursion boat.

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The “Future of the Fjords” heralds the future of electric passenger shipping.
14 January 2021
Exhaust-Free Travel Experience in Norway

Range and energy availability count among the most important variables in electric mobility. Anyone who has planned a route with an eVehicle, knows to look, not only for the most advantageous roads, but also for available charging stations. The situation in shipping is quite similar; however, with completely different dimensions involved in calculating the required performance. The “Future of the Fjords” shows how this future can look. The WAGO 750 I/O System is used for load management on the Norwegian excursion boat.

There are already numbers related to maritime eMobility that make one sit up and take notice: drive power of 900 kW, battery capacity of 1.8 Mwh, charging time of twenty minutes. This is what it takes for the ship of the year 2018 to strike out and show its 400 passengers the beauty of the Nærøyfjord – without polluting the UNESCO world heritage site with the residues linked to conventional internal combustion engines. The ship, which is architecturally striking as well, could be made suitable for daily use because an essential part of the development concerned the design of a suitable “socket”. The docking station can be compared to a floating power bank and has its own battery. This acts like a booster during charging, and is then recharged again after the boat sails off. The background for this structure is that the existing supply network on land could not independently provide the necessary output for fast charging the ship.

The project was implemented by Westcon, a Norwegian company. While the ship took shape in the shipyards, Westcon's Power & Automation division took care of all of the maritime technology. This is based on e-SEAMatic, an independent automation system, which can be used beyond its maritime roots on land, in process technology applications and in the energy sector.

Knowing Where the Energy Flows

The redundantly designed control system is based on WAGO Controllers, in order to read sensor systems and actuators for energy and battery management. These controllers, from the PFC100 series, received a fixed program for this, in order to automatically mirror the input and outputs on a process image. The process image is transmitted to the controllers via Ethernet/IP using media redundancy. In this way, the ‘normal’ couplers become smart couplers, which primarily monitor the energy flows in the drive, the onboard technology, and consumption by the so-called hotel operations. These data are necessary to guarantee the operating safety of the “Future of the Fjords” in view of the limited energy storage in the battery.

The significance of this part of the onboard technology is also clear, in that application engineers from WAGO Norway were involved in the engineering design from an early stage. The fact that WAGO interacts closely with battery manufacturers likewise played a role in the selection of systems. The expertise they have gained is reflected on the hardware side in standardized modules and interfaces with approvals for maritime use.

In addition, the architecture supports CAN communication, which is common in these applications, which facilitates the integration into the higher-level ship operating technological systems as well as communication in the direction of the battery cells. With a view toward operational safety, the smart couplers carry out both their actual task of decentralized communication nodes, and also monitor the network, and can thereby recognize, for example, if the master controller is still active or is down.

Conclusion

Operational safety is highly important on board ships. For the “Future of the Fjords”, efficiency and availability are also crucial, particularly if there are only 20 minutes available to charge the batteries. Because the next passengers are already waiting to crowd the upper deck and panorama windows and be amazed by the spectacular landscapes of the Norwegian Nærøyfjord.

Text: Steffen Friedrich, Global Key Account Manager Marine & Offshore at WAGO GmbH & Co. KG
Photos: Thorsten Sienk

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PFC100 Controller

A fast CPU, supported by a large amount of data processing, a runtime system with e!COCKPIT, Linux^® and multiple interfaces, as well as cybersecurity via SSL/TLS encryption, VPN and a firewall: This is what the PFC100 Controller offers!

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