Langfang Thermal Power Sets a New Benchmark, Redefining Campus Security with 5G Private NetworkLangfang Thermal Power Sets a New Benchmark, Redefining Campus Security with 5G Private Network

Thermal power plants are important to electricity supply and heating in winter, with people and vehicles coming and going for transportation, routine inspection, and maintenance all day long, their campus security is under tremendous pressure. A 5G private network with elaborate design meets the digital transformation requirements, and improves the production efficiency, security management, and data security.

November 21, 2024

6 Min Read
5G Private Networks
5G Private Networksistockphoto.com

In northern China, thermal power plants are important to electricity supply and heating in winter, which have close connection with people’s works and lives. These plants have various equipment and large workshops for complex processes. With people and vehicles coming and going for transportation, routine inspection, and maintenance all day long, their campus security is under tremendous pressure.

To address these complex challenges, China Unicom and Huawei worked with CHN Energy to develop a 5G private network solution for thermal power plants. Combining 5G and AI, big data, IoT, and cloud computing, the solution promotes comprehensive digital and intelligent transformation in thermal power plants. To date, the solution has been already commercially deployed at CHN Energy Langfang Thermal Power, and has been widely recognized by the industry for its impressive results.

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Campus Security is Paramount for Smart Power Plants.

Located in southeast of Langfang city, Langfang Thermal Power is an essential branch of CHN Energy. It feeds the power grids across Beijing, Tianjin, Tangshan, and northern Hebei. It is also the only heat supplier to the city of Langfang. Within the framework of CHN Energy's business growth plan for 2021 to 2025, Langfang Thermal Power has been making concerted efforts to make its power plant smarter and greener by increasing productivity and reducing carbon emissions.

This has not been easy, as Wang Qiang, a director at Langfang Thermal Power, recalled: "In the past, we used to manually inspect the different processes across our huge campus. There were many risks areas but we had to operate 24/7." He explained that the management team had realized digital transformation could significantly improve its campus security, and so it had high expectations for its transition to a smart plant.

In its smart-campus survey, Langfang Thermal Power management team found there were no standardized solutions available to ensure quick implementation. On average, it would take about half to a year to complete customization and deployment for each and every project. Furthermore, the heavy use of Wi-Fi, RFID and ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning technologies meant that complex maintenance and data management would be needed, which offset the gains in production and management efficiency. To overcome these challenges, CHN Energy Langfang Thermal Power worked with China Unicom and Huawei to deploy 5G private network at its campus, to connect people, vehicles, things, and environments across the campus and catalyze the use of information and communications technologies in production.

New Technologies and Devices Build a Strong Foundation for Intelligent Digitalization.

After carefully analyzing the service environments and project requirements, China Unicom and Huawei brought in an all-star lineup of innovative technologies and devices to transform the campus into a smart campus. According to Ni Xiong, Director of Huawei's China Carrier 5GtoB Solution Sales Division, the ICT product portfolio and technical solutions that Huawei and other players provided for this project included advanced networks, computing power, and digital twins.

The digital and intelligent foundation is underpinned by computing power and networks. The world's first high-computing-power platform designed by Huawei is used. It can optimize its high uplink, low latency, and positioning to enable multiple differentiated services concurrently. In addition, the digital and intelligent foundation features Huawei's leading indoor and outdoor 5G base stations, including LampSite X, Easy Macro 3.0, and MetaAAU. The private network uses Massive MIMO to support an average uplink speed of 200 to 300 Mbps, which is sufficient for uploading large amounts of data in real time.

High-precision positioning is essential for intelligent campus management. For this, 5G low power high accuracy positioning (LPHAP) technology, developed by Huawei in partnership with industry players, is commercially used for the first time. The positioning is based on BeiDou outdoors and uplink time difference of arrival (U-TDOA) algorithms indoors, with an overall geolocation accuracy within 1 meter @ 90%. Ultra-low power consumption enables devices to stand by for months on a single full charge. Previously, they could only stand by for days on a single charge.

Digital twins, which were also developed by Huawei and its industry partners, are used to enable centimeter-level modeling of service environments and distribution with a 99% precision rate. This brings multifold benefits: Geo-fencing and HD cameras can be used to track the locations of people in real time and reduce the number of false alarms; 5G and MEC edge computing support the seamless integration of networks, hardware, and software. In addition, AI and big-data applications improve object recognition and trend predictions and generate warnings in just 3 seconds to facilitate predictive maintenance.

An Elaborate Design Meets Digital and Intelligent Campus Requirements.

Working alongside other industry players, China Unicom and Huawei carefully devised a solution to help CHN Energy Langfang Thermal Power meet its project objectives, which, according to You Dinglin, General Manager of China Unicom Langfang, included: monitoring the precise locations of people, vehicles, and things, trunking communications, uploading data in real time, controlling operations remotely, and enabling automatic inspections, as well as streamlining management operations onto a single platform.

Realizing the significance of high-precision positioning for intelligent campus management, China Unicom implemented a converged positioning solution for indoor and outdoor areas to monitor the precise positions of people, vehicles, and things on a 3D map in real time. Macro base stations, pole sites, and small cells were deployed to ensure 5G network coverage across the campus. The good network coverage allows the solution to provide inspection robots and HD cameras with the connections required for their upload of analysis reports and video data to various devices, such as PCs, personal assistance devices (PADs), and mobile phones in real time. As a result, an alarm can be handled on multiple devices, allowing for quicker response. You Dinglin also praised the fact that by adopting 5G private network instead of Wi-Fi and UWB networks, the enterprise no longer needs to seek technical support from multiple vendors during day-to-day O&M, with all of the devices now coming from a single network operator.

China Unicom's standard converged management platform facilitates production safety, converged positioning, and data security management. It gives the customer the flexibility to customize its management functions. In addition, to ensure campus information security, a 5G user plane function (UPF) unit was deployed locally, and the latest "FeiDun" security gateway based on the generic bootstrapping architecture (GBA) was put in place. Together with IoT SAFE (SuperSec SIM card), these measures provide robust protection for networks, data, and chipsets and ensure end-to-end (E2E) data security and trustworthiness.

"It took us only eight months to build the 5G private network from initiation to completion. It makes safety management twice more as efficient and we can now handle risks 20% faster", said Wang Qiang with a smile. "We have signed an agreement with China Unicom and Huawei to use this solution in our new projects as well. Our project has already been selected as a new benchmark for smart power plants by CHN Energy".

"5G private network play a key in improving production efficiency, security management, data security. We believe that the solution will have a tremendous effect on the campus and can be widely adopted in various industry sectors," stated You Dinglin. "We will continue to work with Huawei to replicate the success of CHN Energy Langfang Thermal Power and help other enterprises to pursue digital and intelligent transformation."

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