Cabinets
Two types of cabinets were designed to meet the challenging project requirements. Both products were integrated to the 3rd stage of our integration stages. This comprises of mechanical assembly with thermal management and power management.
The IP65 cabinets were equipped with a number of features that allow them to operate in extremely onerous environments. When designing the product we took a number of factors into consideration including:-
Deployment Conditions
The cabinets had to conform to the strict sizes of the motorway hatches in the road surface via which they would be deployed along the length of the tunnels. In house design team and manufacturing techniques allowed us to develop suitable cost effective solutions. Additionally the deployment had to take place during the night to limit potential traffic disruptions, thus the cabinets had to be fully assembled to ensure the roadway could re-open on time.
Water Flooding
The cabinets were located in the area below the roadway. This area experiences ongoing flooding coming from the underground water streams. Despite the tunnel pump system regulating the water levels we still needed to ensure the cabinet plinths and cable seals would provide secure protection against these conditions.
Corrosive Water
The water accessing the tunnel grounds can be fresh water or salt laiden water. This required extra protection in a form of a special paint coat. The stainless steel cabinet construction has been layered with specially designed high performance paint. Our proven external powder coating system consists of a number of different processes which when applied to strict guidelines provide adequate protection for the most challenging environment.
The paint process developed by Rainford Solutions is a result of years of experience of designing cabinets for various corrosive environments worldwide.
Tunnel Curvature
The naturally curved tunnel surface required the cabinet plinth to have features which allowed the cabinets to be installed at various locations. This adaptation allowed keeping the cabinet in correctly levelled, vertical position suitable for the equipment.
Air Pollution
The tunnel environment is potentially corrosive due to the various emissions including diesel/petrol fumes, brake dust or even fuel spillages. The area in which the cabinets where installed are fed clean air from the main ventilation shafts via large fans towers. The system blows clean air into the tunnels and extracts the dirty air created by fumes and emissions from the circa 35 thousands vehicles which use the tunnel every day.
In order to protect the equipment from this harmful environment and to sustain its correct temperature, the product was equipped with an integral Heat Exchanger Solution designed and built by Rainford thus regulating the cabinet internal temperature, reducing maintenance down time and providing a clean internal cabinet environment to house the critical equipment.
