A Tarmac Western quarry has upgraded its existing coax based monochrome CCTV system.
Looking to reduce its operational overheads and improve the quality of its CCTV pictures, a Tarmac Western quarry has chosen to expand and upgrade its existing coax based monochrome CCTV system, using Network Video Technologies (NVT), unshielded twisted pair (UTP) video transmission technology. Located south of Shrewsbury, at Bayston Hill, the massive Tarmac quarry that produces road stone mainly for the production of asphalt, wanted to improve the safety and efficiency of its stone crushing monitoring process, whilst reducing the associated manpower costs. Providing a practical solution to Tarmac?s brief, Sentinel Security Systems specified and installed a replacement CCTV system, entrusting the relay of high quality, real-time camera images across the hostile, electrical-noise prone quarry environment, using NVT?s double award winning UTP video transmission equipment. Observing the multi-stage gritstone crushing, sizing and shaping process, mounted high above each of the quarry?s five giant crushing machines and over the transportation conveyor belt system, high-resolution pictures supplied by Ademco JE7331 colour cameras, are fed to a process control monitoring room 800 metres away. Using a single steel armoured multi-pair cable, laid over a hazardous route, including a 50 metre long tunnel, pin-sharp camera images are transmitted for the remote surveillance of materials through the quarrying-to-asphalt production process. Commenting on the new system, Kevin Dick, Tarmac Western?s Works Manager said: ?I put the significant improvement in picture quality over the previous coax based CCTV system, down to the use of NVT?s UTP video transmission equipment. With the replacement system, we have achieved our objective of removing the requirement for people to be physically present at the potentially hazardous crushing machines. The entire production process including checking for machine blockages and plant throughput is now observed in complete safety, and by using just one operator, we have cut labour costs.? The site?s previous coax based transmission system suffered problems of poor quality pictures and hum bars. Sentinel Security chose to eradicate the problem by relaying camera images using a NVT UTP ?kit?. Mark Bishop, Sentinel?s Technical Director explained: ?NVT simplify the choice of video transmission equipment by offering pre-packed kits. We made the selection of the appropriate kit, that includes eight single channel active video transmitters and an eight channel hub receiver, by simply referencing the number of cameras to be installed, by the maximum cable transmission distance between camera and monitor. Installing multiple coaxes would have been an extremely difficult job but using a single multi-pair cable was far less of a headache, and the results are some of the best pictures we have seen.”
