We are here at the international cargo port of Krishnapatnam Port, not far from Chennai in India. Handling several million tons of goods, Krishnapatnam Port is one of the largest harbours in the whole of India. Alongside thousands of other goods, ever greater quantities of the artificial fertiliser urea arrive here on a regular basis. The fertiliser is unloaded from the ship on belt conveyors and stored in huge mountainous piles in three vast warehouses. Nowadays, the fertiliser is to partly automatically bagged by machinery and manually loaded onto lorries. These lorries then transport the sacks to the freight trains, onto which they are again reloaded by hand. As the handling capacities for urea in the port have continued to grow over the past few years, it is now only possible to perform this entire process (from ship to rail wagon) by the use of full automation. To deal with the problem, six automatic bagging machines and twelve palletizers will be installed using the corresponding conveyor system components in a 800 m long building, which is located next to the rail system.

The solution
This is where Mr. Lanfer’s many years of experience come into play. To automate the process, he planned a sophisticated control concept for the conveyor system, which is some 6,000 metres long. So that errors in the transportation process are visible immediately, the sub-systems and the entire conveyor line will be monitored by web cams from a control room. A complete visual display of all subsystems is to be presented in overview format in the control room. For this purpose, comprehensive planing and selection of the IT network components and an operating and monitoring concept are required for the control room.

The result
After extensive elaboration of the entire concept with the subsequent preparation of a tender, the control and automation components, the IT network and the operating and monitoring concept for the control room were completely designed according to plan by Mr. Lanfer and his team and then presented to the customer in India.

One Euro pallet at Wiesehoff Dairy must be able to carry a load weighing 1,000 kg. This load must be conveyed over 50 metres. The temperature of the “passengers”, i.e. milk and other chilled products, may not exceed 8 degrees Celsius. The same also applies to midsummer, when the outside temperature can be as high as 45 degrees. The Euro pallets at the Sahnemolkerei will transport the dairy products from the production facilities to the new pallet warehouse, which will soon be constructed on the bordering plot of land.
A tender for the construction of a conveyor line has already been submitted by a planning firm – one of our market competitors. This tender plans to erect a bridging structure, on which the pallet conveyor line will run. In order to keep energy consumption low during summertime, with a predetermined outside temperature of 45 degrees Celsius, the conveyor line housing would need to be extremely thick. As the distance between the buildings will be approximately 50 metres and the fact that, due to other structures, it will only be possible to erect a few support columns, the bridge carriers and support columns must have an extremely solid structure.

The solution
A tender will be submitted to Wiesehoff Dairy. After the initial planning documentation for the conveyor system components had been viewed, Mr. Lanfer had a simple idea: why not basically transport the pallets underground through a tunnel? A positive secondary benefit of this solution would also mean that the conveyor line would not need to be cooled quite as much – if at all.
The more the idea was discussed with the customer, the more it began to look like an actual realistic possibility. After evaluating all the tenders, the entire system was even 15% cheaper than our competitors with the extensive bridge structure. Furthermore, this solution offered the advantage that the running costs were significantly lower due to the natural cooling.

The result
The customer also appeared to be impressed by the solution. From the presentation of the new solution approach, through the complete planning, tender preparation, design and lay-out of the entire project, to the fully functional handover, Mr. Lanfer offered the company everything from a single source. He also took over the project management for the entire IT network planning, configuration and connection of the IT systems.
Today, a modern and attractive conveyor system is still in place in Schöppingen. This system has fulfilled and even exceeded all the original expectations of the customer, both in terms of cooling and with respect to the forecast energy requirement.

The Lanfer system house grew so strongly by 2012 that the facilities in Borken-Weseke suddenly became inadequate. Thus in 2012 the perfect time had come for the company to move to Bocholt, into a bigger and more modern office building and to renovate the now vacant former building in Borken-Weseke from the ground up.
Since the building was erected in 1987, only the most essential repair works and extensions had been carried out, without taking energy costs into account. Now was also the perfect time to fully renovate and refurbish the building and to install innovative and future-oriented building technology, so that greater cost efficiency could finally be possible. Starting with the fitted carpets, interior doors from the Lebo company, to the heating system with district heating connection to a local combined heat and power plant, the photovoltaic plant, the lighting, the shading system, the air-conditioning system, through to the complete electrical installation – everything was fully renovated and refurbished. As the various disciplines/components were all sourced from different manufacturers, these also have different system interfaces. Thus for example the DALI bus system was responsible for the lighting technology, the KNX bus (also knows as EIB) for sensors and actuators and the SMI bus for the building’s external shading system. The air-conditioning systems were addressed via a V.24 interface and the servomotors for the heating system via the BACnet bus.
Now the various bus systems had to be interconnected in such a way that information could be exchanged across all disciplines. At ten months, the entire conversion time was given a very short allocation.

The solution
The prime objective of the renovation process was to make running thee building, with its individual disciplines, more energy efficient – and in doing so, more cost-effective.
Before the conversion works began, Mr. Lanfer put in place the following three framework parameters:

• All disciplines to communicate with one another via TCP/IP, so that information which is available to an individual discipline will also be available to all other disciplines, e.g. weather data, room allocation plans etc.
• To simplify operation, all information will be displayed on a uniform interface.
• Operator interface and operation of the various disciplines will be independent of the hardware.

For transmission via the TCP/IP protocol, Mr. Lanfer found the right solution in the products from the Wago GmbH company. What makes these products unique is that they are can quickly convert a range of different bus systems to TCP/IP. The plan was for the entire network to be installed as quickly and as simply as possible, as a very short building conversion time had been allocated. Here also, Mr. Lanfer chose a product (WINSTA) from Wago GmbH.

In order to represent all information on a uniform and hardware-independent system, it was advised to employ the latest browser technology, HTML5. Following intensive brand research, Mr. Lanfer opted for the product advice from the Cetrec company as a solution for small to medium-sized buildings.
For large and spacious buildings, however, further disciplines are involved, for example video monitoring, access control, photovoltaic plant, lift systems etc. Here, Mr. Lanfer opted for a solution using the Winguard product from the Advancis company.

So that the various individual disciplines could be linked integrally, Mr. Lanfer produced the following solutions:

• Sun-dependent shading
• Daylight-dependent lighting
• Individual room control according to room occupancy/allocation and depending on the season (in summer by the air-conditioning system and in winter, by the radiators)
• Modern conference technology in the conference room
• Modern monitoring technology
• Fast and cost-effective installation technology

The result
Thanks to all these innovative technologies and systems, it was possible to demonstrably reduce the energy consumption of the building by over 35%.

In addition to the IT systems, the following was also installed:

• A new entrance door and new interior doors (some with illuminated handles)
• A new fitted carpet (now standard in all office areas)
• A new guest toilet (with coloured tap markings – red = hot, blue = cold)
• Air-conditioning in all office areas
• A new gas central heating system (the old oil heating system was no longer up-to-date)
• A modern heating control system
• A district heating connection to a combined heat and power plant
• An external shading system
• Completely new electronics cabling and data processing cabling

New LED lighting in every room

The building was fully refurbished from the ground up.