No experiments at Klimahaus Bremerhaven

Working with live animals requires special skills. While the industry in a plant standstill ‘only’ loses a lot of money, a failure of technology in a large aquarium, in the truest sense of the word, is life-threatening.

Sweat, freezing, amazement, wonder – these are just a few of the emotions a traveller along the eighth longitude experiences.  In the case of Klimahaus (Climate House) Bremerhaven in Germany, this promise can even be made without having to travel by air or water. Children, families and entire school classes get a look into the life of different climatic zones, experience the causes and consequences of climate change and get to know the beauty of nature personally.

In order to communicate these facts, visitors of the climate house wander through rugged rock formations to summits in the Swiss Alps, assume the perspective of an insect on Sardinia and feel the sand of the Sahel zone under their own feet. To ensure that the water-rich areas of our planet can be experienced by visitors to Bremerhaven, huge aquariums with 135 different types of fish were built. Large aquariums show the diverse life of fish and corals on a south-pacific fringing reef and a river landscape with a rainforest basin in Cameroon.

Even technology at the highest level is getting old

Large aquariums such as those in the Klimahaus Bremerhaven are complex technical systems that require complex support. In order to emulate the ecosystem as well as possible, a finely tuned plant control is necessary. Here, it depends above all on parameters such as oxygen and CO2 content, narrow temperature corridors and pH-values.

When the climate house was opened in Bremerhaven in June 2009, the domestic engineering technology used was state-of-the-art. Cooling and heating intermesh and regenerative sources, such as photovoltaics, source air supply and energy piles, ensure a favourable energy and CO2 balance. However, over the years, more and more problems arose in the operation of aquariums in particular. After ten years of operation, some of the components used had already been discontinued by the manufacturer – making spare parts management more and more difficult.
“Important controls were no longer available and could not be reordered by us”, says Dennis Münch. He is a control engineer at Peckerson GmbH, a specialist company with a full-service offer for properties with extraordinary challenges.
 

“You cannot just install the latest version of the panel since you’re facing a true cascade of issues”

“This is quite normal: in older systems, instabilities occur over time, it is sometimes a broken server or computer”, says Dennis from his experience. Although components would be replaced accordingly, over time, however, a patchwork of technology would result. From the time of the initial installation, all measurement & control (MC) systems in the field of water treatment and control of the North Sea and Samoa basins were operated via Siemens S7-314 PLC. The visualisation ran on old Siemens MP277 panels. In addition, there was no software license for the old Siemens programs.

In the climate house, it was the control panels that were particularly worrying. “You can not just install the latest version of the panel since you're facing a true cascade of issues: the panel is no longer compatible with the server. Even if it is updated, the programming on the server is no longer compatible with the installed software. That would also have to be reprogrammed”, Dennis describes the situation. Overall, this creates a chaotic picture.
 

A days-long stoppage means death for the animals

The 20 technicians, who are responsible for the welfare of the marine and river dwellers in shifts, have recently been under ever-increasing pressure. The special sea and river dwellers are too valuable, and it would be dramatic if they were damaged.

Furthermore, due to the special economic situation – as the Klimahaus is a leisure and tourism destination with an educational mission, the city of Bremerhaven takes over a part of the costs incurred – an expensive complete renewal of the MC technology was excluded from the beginning. A simple exchange was, as described, also not possible. The original manufacturer no longer exists and there was no documentation of the system. At the same time, it had to be ensured that a changeover would run smoothly in just one day and that the system would be ready for use again immediately.
 

Good teamwork is the solution

In this mixed situation, the engineering support group of itsme Schultz+Erbse was in contact with the technical planning and consulting due to another smaller order. First talks showed which way you could come together. In addition to the tight timeframe for the exchange, the demanding task was above all to offer a cost-effective retrofit solution and to show the urban financier the complex relationships.

“The project had to be planned thoroughly. The service provider had to have the complete overview, know the panels, know the programming technology and know the master computer, to be able to move safely in the external system. It all has to fit, because there is no backup during the conversion phase”, explains Dennis the reason for the choice of itsme Schultz+Erbse.

Finally, the city, plant operators and service providers decided to renew the PLC control programs and visualisations, combined with a previous data backup of the S7 programs and a complex system analysis.

The retrofit concept offers history

During the first phase, all PLC S7 programs and existing visualisations were saved and compared with the incomplete documentation. Afterwards, the old Siemens MP277 HMIs were replaced with Proface SP5600WAD + SP5B10 12 ‘HMIs with Powerbox, the entire graphical user interface was recreated and all data points were reconnected to the corresponding Siemens S7-314C controllers.

In the course of this, another main reason for the renewal project was also addressed: in the past the operators repeatedly demanded to be able to carry out a subsequent analysis of problems. There was no reliable storage of such data before the project. If, despite all precautions, fish deaths occur, it is extremely important for the aquarium technician to have access to a long-term record of all readings and all controls, e.g. if valves were opened or pumps had been switched off. Historical data helps to understand mistakes and rule out repetition.

Another innovation: the project team set up remote link interfaces on the workstations using WinGPViewer. From these, all systems can now be monitored, operated and adapted.
 

“It all has to fit, because there is no backup during the conversion phase”

The remote control is particularly important for the on-call service of the aquarium technicians: in the future, even before they leave home in the event of an emergency call, they can already remotely analyse the situation and take countermeasures if necessary. At the same time, these accesses are protected against unauthorised access via modern security concepts.

After an extensive briefing and training of the technical team with direct support via itsme Schultz+Erbse, he is sure that the operation will continue smoothly. But with the many thousands of elements that make up the whole system, somewhere a UV filter, a pump or a frequency converter must be exchanged, suspects Dennis and laughs: “The climate house is a great project, but one in which there is always something to do.”

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