If you think you have heard everything, what about using balloons to get boxes off ships?<\/p>\n
Surprisingly, balloon technology already exists: during the Vietnam war balloons were used to unload military equipment; more recently in 2002, a 200ft diameter balloon showed it could lift a 55 tonne tank in the air and there have even been some attempts at moving commercial cargo.<\/p>\n
Jeremy Wiley of Tethered Air dispels some misconceptions: \u201cBalloons, taken above the ground layer turbulence at about 300ft, don\u2019t \u2018bounce around\u2019.\u201d It\u2019s also safe, he says: \u201cThese balloons don\u2019t \u2018pop\u2019 like latex, even if shot at they only leak very slowly,\u201d and other kinds of resilience, like extra balloons and industrial cabling, is built-in.<\/p>\n
So, why hasn\u2019t the idea already taken off? One point is that earlier solutions relied on the balloons to move: this, because of air and wind resistance, is slow which puts the cycle time above 20 minutes \u201cand this kills it commercially\u201d, says Mr Wiley. However, he has reconsidered the issue and come up with a solution that may yet make it viable: \u201cYou can simply keep the balloons stationary and use winches and cables to move the cargo.\u201d<\/p>\n
Further, the kind of accurate control needed for significant loads has, he says, finally arrived: \u201cModern robotic technology has made enormous advances in the last couple of years, so for the first time in history we have highly-reliable obstacle avoidance, path planning and contingency mitigation.\u201d In fact NASA JPL’s Robotics team, better known for the Mars rover landing in 2012, is also getting involved in the project.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Taking off<\/strong> <\/p>\n The benefit of balloon technology is that it could be much more easily deployed that conventional systems, helping new, greenfield sites get a toehold without huge capital expenditure and to help prove the point, the company is hoping to run a month long, continuous demonstration in a convenient location, simply picking and placing typical cargo payloads.<\/p>\n But there is a second, very pragmatic idea from Mr Wiley in that a balloon solution could simply be rented out to help certain ports cope with the worst of the seasonal queues, especially as the footprint is going to be a lot smaller than a whole new piece of infrastructure. In fact, Mr Wiley says that is where he expects balloon technology to first penetrate adding: \u201cWe are, right now, quite able to arrange a balloon technology demonstration for interested parties.\u201d<\/p>\n This ability to integrate with existing solutions is key says Walter Kemmsies of Moffat & Nichol: \u201cIt is very difficult to penetrate the market with new or novel technology as present solutions have evolved to take in huge economies of scale, but I would still say there are real benefits if you can dovetail into to these pre-existing systems.\u201d<\/p>\n On the other hand he says in some places there\u2019s good reason to consider what may seem at first pie-in-the-sky answers. He believes that there is room for new technology that could leapfrog the usual developmental paths in places that have consistently balked the hurdle of more typical infrastructure.<\/p>\n He points out: \u201cWhile the standard solutions can and do work in many instances, in the last century the standard solutions haven\u2019t really helped places such as Brazil.\u201d<\/p>\n He adds: \u201cBrazil has the ability to grow three crops a year and be the largest exporter in the world, but they just can\u2019t get crops out of the country. Likewise, Africa probably has the world\u2019s largest ore deposits, but it suffers from the same kind of issues.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Modal shift<\/strong> <\/p>\n It\u2019s the disjointed nature of the hinterland networks behind the ports that\u2019s the biggest problem: \u201cIn Brazil you can have several modal changes before you get to a port, and with Africa the number of transfers could be as many as 14,\u201d he explains. Therefore rather than trying to get the cargo to route to existing, far off gateways, technology that could bring an export facility as close to the production site as possible should be taken seriously.<\/p>\n But this, he firmly believes, means being open to new thinking, and says existing but underutilised technology like balloon operations \u2013 as wild as it sounds – could bring important gains for places like Brazil and Africa \u201cwhich are resource rich but infrastructure poor\u201d.<\/p>\n If a port development is sticking to tried and trusted solutions, it could be missing a trick.<\/p>\n Most typical yard configurations suffer from a dilemma: despite technology’s best attempts to optimise each piece of handling kit, it has inefficiency at its heart, largely in the familiar form of the stack.<\/p>\n Alexio Picco of Circle Srl, partner of the Israel Aerospace Industry (IAI), explains that while room is available, ports naturally tend to keep the stacks low but that isn\u2019t an efficient use of land. In city ports stacks six high aren\u2019t uncommon but as a consequence there\u2019s a related rise in unproductive moves that goes along with the necessary reshuffling. There\u2019s also often a couple of handovers between apron and stacks with some kind of human intervention, if only on the twistlock handling.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Container stack<\/strong> <\/p>\n One innovation whose time may have come is a kind of multi-storey box park, developed by IAI LAHAV, more usually known for their sophisticated military projects. Mr Picco explains that the Robotic Container Management System (RCMS) relies on a number of highly manoeuvrable Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) rather than other varieties of equipment, which smoothes out the handling flow.<\/p>\n After receiving the box from the ship to shore crane, the AGVs take it straight to the elevators; moving a container around is fairly simple as it rests on a frame that allow AGVs to slip in and out underneath, so once at the right floor it\u2019s picked up and slid into its designated cell. Separating the horizontal moves from the vertical like this means it\u2019s possible to have multiple moves taking place at the same time on different floors while achieving direct access for each container, all automatically managed by the IAI Control Centre.<\/p>\n On exiting the terminal, spreaders integrated into the ceiling could service waiting truck or train beds simultaneously on different sides.<\/p>\n Having these separate cells eliminates any need for the usual reshuffling; housekeeping can be eliminated and changes are more easily accommodated. Further, information is easily read in the cells and remotely synched, plus scanning could potentially take place inside the RCMS, removing the need to transfer containers to another yard area.<\/p>\n Another point, says Mr Picco, is that you can build up high, even 15 floors saving, he calculates, between 50% and 70% of the ground space used for even high density stacks. \u201cA much better idea than land reclamation,\u201d he says, \u201cand less costly.”<\/p>\n The obvious question is that if it\u2019s all so high tech, what about breakdowns? This kind of thing can\u2019t be done cheap says Mr Picco, most of the investment in the RCMS comes down to the extremely robust design of the floating resources: the AGVs and bank of lifts. He adds: \u201cApart from that, it\u2019s quite a simple building.\u201d This means there\u2019s always a number of routes between one point and another: problems in one area won\u2019t cause a massive jam and the use of AGVs as \u2018maids of all work\u2019 gives it an inherent flexibility.<\/p>\n The main equipment has been shown to work on a small prototype simulating both 20ft and 40ft containers, so at time of writing, Circle and IAI are looking \u201cfor the right partner to trial the RCMS\u201d. Echoing Mr Kemmsies point about \u2018dovetailing\u2019 with existing solutions Mr Picco points out that “modular, scalable technology can slot in, right alongside present systems”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Balloons and robotised box parks could soon be helping ports compete, writes Stevie Knight<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":9081,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-9080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-container-cargo-handling"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9080"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9082,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9080\/revisions\/9082"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9080"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=9080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}