Rangers Football Club teams up with Mitsubishi

Scottish Premier club, Glasgow Rangers, is using Mitsubishi Electric's automation equipment to control a new irrigation system for the football pitches at its comprehensive new training facilities.

Scottish Premier club, Glasgow Rangers, has chosen to use Mitsubishi Electric's automation equipment to control a new irrigation system for the football pitches at its comprehensive new training facilities.

The GBP 12.5 million state-of-the-art training complex at Milngavie is set on a 38 acre site.

The facilities include three full size professional football pitches, three full size football pitches for youth training and a full size outdoor Astroturf pitch.

The complex also includes extensive medical, dining, catering and other facilities to enable up to 70 footballers to train comfortably in all weathers.

The new training facility needed lots of flat land and the Milngavie site proved to be a suitable area.

The only problem was that the land was quite low compared with sea level and the area had a relatively high water table.

This meant that to achieve a consistent training/playing surface an automatic control system was required to keep the water level down during wet periods.

The control system would also need to be able to irrigate the land during dry spells.

Peter Kingstone, The Rangers Football Centre General Manager, states: "Installation of a self-contained irrigation and drainage system meant that we had complete control over water conditions at the site, with the additional benefit of keeping our water supply costs to a minimum.

The installation of the new system enabled us to control all aspects of the site's water needs, especially the pitches watering and drainage requirements.

This allows the football squads to train at the site regardless of weather conditions".

Installed in May 2001, the training site uses two Mitsubishi Electric A540 (18.5 and 22kW, respectively) variable speed drives to take care of all water movement.

The A540's provided the high reliability and maintenance free solution to the pumping problem with their MTBF of 10 years.

The drives are housed in two separate pumping stations as part of the self contained and self supplying drainage and irrigation system.

One 18.5kW drive is connected to a pump which draws or pumps water to/from a lagoon near the training ground into the irrigation system.

A 22kW drive connects onto another pump which controls water flow and pressure around the entire underground irrigation system, of the complex.

When required the pumps work together to remove excess water from the site into the lagoon or if needed they pump water from the lagoon around the pitches.

Mitsubishi's A540 drives used at the site are dual rated.

This means 18.5kW can be connected onto a 22kW motor and the 22kW drive connected to a 30kW motor.

This dual rating cuts down on equipment cost without reducing the efficiency of the pumps.

The A540's integral PID loop controller is used to automatically control the water flow, temperature and levels.

This feature uses analogue sources from field devices as the variable input to the loops.

The PID loop characteristics are set using the drives own parameter unit with the drives fast CPU converting this PID data to a variable output to control the water need.

Rangers chose to use Mitsubishi equipment as it fulfilled its performance criteria and could meet the overall objective of the project.

It was also recognised that Mitsubishi was able to provide products which had low maintenance and high energy saving capability.

Energy saving was critical in the design specification of the drives as the complete new training facility had been built to be energy efficient including lighting, heating and even the furniture.

Another reason Rangers chose to use Mitsubishi variable speed drives was their backwards compatibility with other Mitsubishi drive series peripherals.

Flexibility was also a major factor as they can have direct connection to various networks and to HMIs to futureproof the system, as well as meeting all new and forthcoming legislation.

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