Harvest the Wind off China’s Eastern Coast

Project Introduction

Location: China

Project Name: Harvest the Wind off China's Eastern Coast

Products Deployed: IGAP-W612H+

Project Requirement

• Excellent waterproof capability, salt spray resistance, and vibration resistance
• Wireless communications
• Outstanding EMI immunity

Solution

Wind power plays a critical role in the global renewable energy market. As global environmental awareness increases and onshore wind farms are subject to many constraints, the industry has turned their eyes to the sea to capture the abundant wind resources available offshore.
In recent years, large-scale offshore wind farms have been deployed across the world and China is no exception. The wind along the eastern coastline of China is estimated to generate 750 million kilowatts of power. Despite abundant wind resources and excellent conditions for development in this area, building wind farms is a complicated task due to frequent occurrence of typhoons.

Given the many constraints of building onshore wind farms, leading Chinese wind turbine manufacturers have shifted focus to offshore wind energy and have thus developed high-power wind turbines for this application. In July 2020, China's first 10MW offshore wind turbine, also the largest turbine in Asia, was successfully connected to the grid at the Xinghua Bay Phase II Offshore Wind Farm. During this project, Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industry used its 1,200T heavy-lift crane ship to assist with installation of the wind turbines while ORing Industrial Networking provided a reliable wireless network solution for the crane.

On top and bottom of the crane sits one wireless AP, which is ORing's IGAP-W612H+ industrial wireless AP. The AP on the top is set to AP mode while that at the bottom is used as a client. Due to the metal body of the crane which may block wireless signals, the antennas are installed on both sides of the slew ring using a feeder cable to ensure seamless communications between the antennas of the top and bottom APs.
The monitoring device on top of the crane transmits data to the bottom AP through the wireless network and the bottom AP sends the data to an industrial PC so the operator can read all kinds of monitoring data in real time.

The IGAP-W612H+ features an industrial-grade design to ensure uninterrupted operation in harsh environments like this where humidity, salt spray, vibration, and electromagnetic interference poses great challenges to the equipment.

System Structure

Why Oring

• Industrial-grade design including a wide temperature range and an IP67-rated housing
• IEEE802.11n 2x2 MIMO for 300Mbps wireless speed
• Support PoE input for easy cabling