Kongsberg Maritime helps Airbus fly

Kongsberg Maritime has installed the automation systems for the new roro vessel Ville de Bordeaux, built at Jinling Shipyard in Nanjing, China, which is operated by a joint venture company consisting of the ship owners Louis Dreyfus (France) and Leif Hoegh (Norway). The vessel will carry parts for the A380, a new aircraft that can accommodate 555 passengers.

The core of the automation system is the DataChief C20 alarm, monitoring and control system and Power Management System (PMS).

The DataChief system onboard consists of five operator stations with three in the engine room, one in the cargo control room and another on the bridge. This utilises 150 distributed processing units throughout the vessel in addition to 13 serial lines, all of which process more than 4,200 signals.

The vessel has two main engines, CPP and two shaft generators, which are managed by two separate Kongsberg Maritime Power Management Systems divided on the port and starboard side of the main switchboard. This arrangement provides a fully redundant system that also covers the diesel generators with double safety modules for each engine. This is the first vessel fitted with this configuration.