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Safer shock-prevention monitoring box from Bender Benelux installed on all Boskalis mobile generators.
During construction of offshore wind farms, windmills have no electrical source. The tower teams, who are installing cables leading to these windmills at sea, must carry their own mobile generators. But there is a problem – these generators are not sufficiently grounded because the yellow transition pieces are sealed in a coating meant to last for 25 years in a saline underwater environment. As a result, the standard circuit breaker is not adequate and this can lead to unsafe situations for workers as well as for equipment.
Recently, when Boskalis wanted to update their mobile generators, Bender Benelux, supplier of these generators, decided to investigate UK law and requirements. The supplier found that the present systems did not meet safety requirements so they set to work to build a new “line insulation monitoring box” with specifications that meet present-day safety standards.
In building the wind towers at sea, small electrical winches to lift equipment to the windmill were running on mobile generators equipped with earth-leakage circuit breakers (ELCB) sensitive to 230V. The ECLB is a safety device used in electrical installations to prevent shock. It detects small stray voltages on the metal enclosures of electrical equipment, interrupting the circuit if dangerous voltage is detected.
Bender Benelux determined that these mobile generators did not meet the safety requirements for the installation of cables in the sea.
Bender concluded that instead of 230V for the generator, the maximum should be 110V and that the standard ELCBs should be replaced with a line insulation monitoring box. This unique monitoring box continuously measures the insulation resistance in the electrical circuit. As soon as the resistance becomes too low (and voltage too high), the circuit is automatically interrupted. It serves as an extra fuse and, whereas the old system reacted after there was a short circuit, this box offers a proactive solution. It reacts before a shock occurs and using lower voltage is also safer because a shock from 110V is less likely to injure a worker if something malfunctions.
In principle, these line insulations monitoring boxes can be used in every industry as a standard precaution. Specifically, this new line insulation monitoring box is a safe application for work in the vicinity of water.
The Bender line insulation monitoring box has been installed in all Boskalis mobile generators and once installed, it did not entail any additional conditions of use. This innovative device could and should be easily applied to all standard generators or electrical installations industry-wide.
CSpect’s state-of-the-art drones help Jan De Nul safely inspect inaccessible spaces
CSpect’s flying robot is making inspections by rope access, scaffolding and cherry pickers obsolete. As Jan De Nul has witnessed, the CSpect drone is an intuitive, reliable and precise indoor inspection tool that reduces the number of personnel needed and alleviates the administrative burden associated with inspections. By eliminating the human interface, operations with practically zero risk can be achieved. Using CSpect’s drones, Jan De Nul has kept their workforce out of harm’s way while reducing downtime and inspection costs.
CSpect drones enable remote visual inspection in any indoor environment and keep workers away from hazardous areas such as confined spaces, extreme heights, and places with energised equipment. CSpect robots can be prepared for visuals within a minute and an entire inspection is performed in a matter of hours instead of days. CSpect drones have conducted inspections in complex areas, such as: hopper walls; pipe lines with a diameter bigger than 500 mm; spuds from the inside; inside transition pieces and towers of wind turbines; cranes; storage, ballast tanks; jetties; areas at heights; bridges; large boilers; and towers.
CSpect’s technology includes cutting-edge drone data capture capabilities, which ensures flawless inspections from the very first flight. A typical drone-based inspection starts with a reconnaissance flight, which identifies all areas of interest deserving a closer look. CSpect’s experience gathered through a wide variety of missions has shown that for most infrastructures 10 minutes is sufficient to perform the reconnaissance flight. Based on the information gathered during the reconnaissance flight, further flights are planned to more deeply inspect defined points of interest through the capture of close-up images. After each segment of the inspection the drone is brought back to the operators to review the images in detail and refine/update the inspection plan on-the-go based on actual data.
In addition, the CSpect drone is the first collision-tolerant drone and is equipped with an innovative wireless communication system that provides a live video feedback. This allows the pilot to bring the drone to the most inaccessible places up to multiple hundreds of metres beyond the line of sight. The video output is directly available to third parties, who can analyse the live footage.
For Jan De Nul the fact that the same scope of inspections is also available below water as above has been a bonus, providing sea-water cross-over inspections on board of vessels as well as ballast tank inspections. The combination of above and below water inspections makes CSpect drones unique in the market and suitable for use in the dredging and maritime industries. Most importantly, CSpect drones are approved by the major Classification Societies: Bureau Veritas, Rina and ABS, to perform inspections by means of Remotely Inspection Techniques (RIT).
No doctor on board? Van Oord and Boskalis agree: MedAssist gives needed medical support to ships at sea
The MedAssist Skills Application provides offline step-by-step instructions for basic medical skills and procedures on board a ship when there is no doctor present or the ship is at a remote location. The app is a low-cost way for the captain to improve his crew’s medical care when they are far away from professional medical staff and facilities. It also helps maritime employers to comply with international safety regulations and legislation for medical care.
The initiative for this long-distance medical support grew from the experiences of doctors at the Emergency Control - Maritime Training (ECMT) - Training Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. At ECMT each year around 500 captains and officers from various companies, including Boskalis and Van Oord, are trained to perform medical procedures. The requests from Boskalis, Van Oord and other clients for digital training and support materials for their ships, led to the development of this “Skills app”. The Skills app contains the 18 most important (STCW) medical procedures that a captain or officer must be able to perform, such as stitching a wound, setting-up a drip, or stabilising a neck.
The app presents information in an intuitive and simple way, using instructional audio, video and photos that give a step-by-step guide to the safe and professional preparation and execution of medical procedures and after-care. The instructions are based on the use of medical resources available on board.
Another application is the Heart App, which consists of an easy-to-use heart rate monitor and the accompanying software on a tablet. With this app, a captain or officer can make a hospital-quality electrocardiogram in a straightforward way, resulting in a PDF file. With one click this PDF can be sent to a doctor onshore to help making a faster and better diagnosis.
These apps also provide support for on board training for the crew. Personnel should take note of the topics on the apps and, for instance, with the electrocardiogram, time should be taken to practice doing this. The app also provides an overview of important phone numbers for contact with various Radio Medical Services and other practical information that may be urgently needed on board. The app also works offline and can be made available in 45 languages. At present, a patented 2-Way-Augmented Reality Application – called MedAssist Live- is being developed, so an onshore doctor can really work together with the captain to solve a medical problem in real-time.
The cost of the Skills app was only 200 euros per tablet per vessel per year, a reasonable price to pay to safeguard crewmembers. Boskalis and Van Oord have both used these apps and see them as a useful addition to the mandatory medical training that their officers complete on a regular basis. Medassist.online's apps combine medical know-how, practical nautical experience and IT knowledge in a simple and effective way, taking into account the often limited bandwidth on board ships. The apps can be made available on a ship’s server, or on dedicated tablets in a rubber encasing.
