Ship refueling control

The Shipping Company is the only carrier, that provides cargo transportation across the Okhotsk sea and the Japan sea, on regular basis. They use fuel control system with Galileosky trackers to count the volume of pumped-in oil. The solution was paid off after the fourth bunkering.

Project background

The shipping company has a fleet of fifteen watercrafts, one of which is Sasсo Aniva container ship, which runs on heating oil fuel. The volume of one full bunkering, a storage of petroleum products in tanks, is about 240 tons. It was important to improve calculations accuracy for correct payments, as the previous flow meter, even with manual measuring pole, cannot guarantee strict results. The project was implemented by one of the experienced integrators, who has equipped more than five thousand vehicles with monitoring systems since 2010.

Challenges

Receive current process parameters remotely
Receive high-precision data on the weight of the fuel oil pumped-in
Calculate the volume accurately

Solution

In this project welding on the ship was prohibited completely. At the same time, it was necessary to fit the flow meter, tracker and the rest of the equipment into the strict dimensions. What is more, stick to specific fuel pipeline shape. This is highly important as you need to avoid hydraulic hammer effect and liquid bubbles appearance when refueling under pressure. To succeed, the integrator had to use patterns for pipes welding in the workshop, pressurize, prime and visit the ship for fitting several times.

As a hardware part of the solution, the high-end Endress Hauser flowmeter with an accuracy of 99.95%, was integrated in the fuel line. The selected flowmeter has temperature sensors, density mass and the flow sensor. After that, the volume is calculated using the data about mass. To display current parameters, an OWEN SP307 panel was installed into the case door.

Galileosky 7x unit was opted for transmitting data to Wialon server. As the refueling takes place at the seaport, there is no need to use out of GSM solutions, network connection works stably, and MODBUS tab in Configurator helps a lot when working with the devices using this protocol.

So far, data is transferred to two places: to the flow meter screen and to Wialon server. Also, the customer asked the integrator to make cable routes to the fourth deck in order to install the OWEN panel in the captain's cabin and monitor the refueling process from three places simultaneously.

Devices

Galileosky 7x

A feature rich GPS tracker for advanced fleet management

Results

Thanks to the Galileosky based solution, Shipping Company can control the mass and volume of fuel oil with high accuracy. Data is displayed in three places: on the flow meter screen, in the captain's cabin and on land, by sending it via Wialon. Tangible results were already evident after the first application. They led to the incoming fuel quality improvement and gave a serious argument when paying for the fuel received. Previous calculating methods often provoked disputes with fuel suppliers.

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