The Armonia and Sinfonia are the first of four MSC Cruise ships that have been redesigned by a project known as the Renaissance project. Imagine a Floating palace that can accommodate over 2,000 passengers, is 54 meters in height, 251 meters in length and 28 meters in width weighing in at 60,000 tons.
The ships were stretched to include more cabins with balconies, more spacious public areas with new entertainment areas for guests that include an outdoor water park with water sprays, fountains and slides.
This extraordinary engineering feat was achieved by slicing the ship in half by following a line marked out with accurate sandblasting and disconnecting over15,000 electric cables. After the ship was split a middle section was inserted. In order to do this the ship was supported on its keel by 22 skid-shoes connect to a hydraulic balance system. Lifting over a 1,000 tons each, the skid-shoes made it possible to roll the 2 sections of the ship apart without any effort.
Eureka System, a Movicon System Integrator and Solution Provider, took charge of controlling the synchronized moving and lifting operations and stability control.
The project involved advanced engineering in dealing various potential issues such as:
- System configurability levels
- Large number of animated objects needing to be display properly
- Constant interpretation of information
- Ability to archive, historical log and analyze data quickly
In order to achieve these demands, the system’s architecture composed of a dual PC workstation monitor equipped with the Movicon 11.4 supervision software and Bosch XLC PLC.
Progea created a specific driver to enable communication between the Bosch and Movicon devices that had great success. The solution design engineered by Eureka System started off by using a configuration wizard to design the cruise ship graphically and the enter the relative parameters in great detail right down to inserting a skid-shoe object with a simple drag and drop from a custom symbol library.
The extremely critical operations for sizing and weighing a large ship demanded the upmost reliability, user friendliness, detailed graphics and data logging of all operations.
Using the flexibility and powerful graphics engine of Movicon 11.4, the project was a success.
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