Mitsubishi Electric has supplied a major video wall installation in South Africa for Transnet Pipeline (TPL), the division of state-owned Transnet that oversees all of South Africa’s strategic fuel pipeline assets
The Pipeline National Operating Centre at Pinetown, Durban, amalgamates all of TPL’s security, management and planning functions into a single state-of-the-art facility designed to increase efficiency and responsiveness.
The new control centre acts as the master control room for Transnet’s New Multi-Product Pipeline (NMPP), a 555km-long trunk line that transports several grades of diesel, petroleum and aviation fuels, from Durban to Johannesburg.
The installation, seen to be the largest ever Full HD video wall project in Africa, consists of three DLP cube systems. Two systems are comprised of Mitsubishi Electric’s 70 inch VS-70HEF120 both in an 8x3 configuration, displaying SCADA and security content respectively.
The third system consists of a 3x2 60 inch VS-60HEF120 system used for general display purposes. Control is provided by three Jupiter video wall controllers. The two large video walls are controlled by Catalyst 4000 controllers, and a single Catalyst 4500 manages the general 3x2 video wall.
Both the Catalyst 4000 controllers were configured with 24 Output channels and 48 Input channels. A total of 48 Sources are available to be displayed on both video walls simultaneously at any given moment in time. This configuration ensures a 100 per cent availability of all information should any of the main video walls fail. The Catalyst 4500 is equipped with HDCP compliant Input and Output channels that support a wide variety of AV hardware.
All three video walls are installed in the same control room, with the two main video walls located opposite of each other. All the processing hardware, including the video wall controllers, are sited in the server room located in the basement. The distance from the source to display is approximately 80 Meters. Fibreoptic cabling is used for all display and output cabling, 54 channels in total. Three multi-core fibreoptic cables were used for each video wall. Each multi-core is spliced to a patch panel in the server room and a patch panel underneath each video wall. Kramer DVI to Fibre encoder/decoders handle all the graphics channel interconnections.
