DRAMMEN, March 28, 2010

The Port of Hamburg was recently the venue for a spectacular naming ceremony when movie icon Sophia Loren christened MSC Cruises’ latest cruiseliner, MSC Magnifica. Built for the Italian company at STX Europe’s Saint-Navaire yard, France, the 294m-long vessel has been fitted with SAM NACOS 65-5 navigation and L-3 Valmarine integrated automation systems. „It’s yet a further example of SAM Group expertise along with our good working partnership with STX and MSC Cruises“, says SAM Electronics’ President, Ulrich Weinreuter.

Featuring a radar-controlled trackpilot and Ecdis, the NACOS system comprises four X and S-band radar scanners linked via a switching matrix to five Multipilot as the combination of ARPA radar, ECDIS, conning and automatic steering control functions in the center console. Other linked systems like Chartpilot and ECDIS for voyage planning as well as position and track monitoring are redundant. Another core element is the Trackpilot for precise automatic steering including track control and speed functionality. The Debeg 4300 VDR; an integral part of the NACOS assembly, is scalable for storage of all data including all radar pictures in a digital format. Also linked to Multipilot systems are secondary sensors such as those for Differential GPS, doppler logging, echo sounding and wind monitoring.

L-3 Valmarine’s state-of-the-art integrated automated system (IAS) is designed to control all machinery functions. It provides approximately 6,600 control and monitoring signals, 3,600 of which are IO hard-wired and 3,000 fed from serial lines. Its Human Machine Interface (HMI) consists of two multifunction workstations (MFW) in Engine Control Room, one MFW at the bridge and another in the switchboard room.

Machinery functions are displayed on 350 full graphic mimics while control and monitoring functions are relayed via two redundant process control stations (PCS). Location of PCS master and reserve units at different fire alarm zones significantly enhances overall system availability in the event of any incident. Meanwhile, IO signals are distributed to 37 remote IO cabinets installed in machinery sectors and 20 MC units in motor control centres. All I/O data are connected by redundant field buses to the PCS systems. The complete assembly’s communications network is ethernet-based with a capacity for 100Mbps/1Gbps using a fibre optic ring with managed switches.