The SmartSafe Bilge Overboard Security System has been developed out of repeated industry requests to provide a failsafe method of prevention against illegal oil discharge to sea. Illegal discharges involving “Magic Pipes” and ‘Empty’ Oily Water Separators are seen as a major contributor to pollution of the seas and vessels are under increasing scrutiny by Port State Control (PSC) Surveyors globally. The system is primarily designed to prevent illegal oily water discharge to sea and will record if one has taken place.

Equipment supplied under MEPC 107(49) has a degree of inbuilt increased assurance in that separator status is recorded along with time and date and it should not be possible for clean water to be used when in the discharge cycle, but even this record and control cannot prevent the “Magic Pipe” type of discharge. For a system to be effective, all aspects of the discharge process should be monitored and recorded. The SmartSafe achieves this utilizing the separator control, oil content output, flow rate and cumulative flow through the discharge pipe and in addition records the ships GPS position, speed and track.

The system is adaptable to a users own definition of increased assurance whether this be secondary oil content monitoring or additional diverter valves for added assurance.

At the end of the discharge process a batch record is printed containing all aspects of the discharge and any errors or event triggers that occurred during this process. The printout can be attached to the manual Oil Record Book for presentation to PSC surveyors. In addition the data is stored within the system and can be played back graphically on the in-built screen, sent for storage to the ships Local Area Network (LAN), printed remotely or downloaded to a standard Personal Computer.

Each start and stop of the oil discharge process creates a new unique file that cannot be tampered with. Routine reports and significant event alarms can be sent to shore via the communications package powered by Purplefinder. Vessels currently fitted with a separator and monitor to the old MEPC 60(33) regulation, this increased assurance solution works to bring the recording capabilities of older devices up to and past that required within MEPC 107 (49) and at the same time providing failsafes to ensure illegal discharges cannot take place. This can result in an expensive ship wide upgrade to 107(49) being avoided.

Optionally, a variety of ships data can also be displayed and recorded in parallel which could include dirty ballast discharge, level gauging, or data from any other critical monitoring process. Please contact us with your additional requirements so we may tailor a system for your specific needs

Pole Star’s range of maritime fleet management and security solutions business has progressively grown since 1998 to include over 600 shipping companies and associated organisations operating in excess of 11,000 vessels. Core to the success has been Pole Star’s proprietary purple finder application - delivering secure, reliable and cost effective web communications between ship and shore.

Purplefinder has been incorporated into the RTE SmartSafe - Bilge Overboard Securtity System to enable global, real-time monitoring and exception based geo-verification of OWS opereations. The image below shows the RTE - SmartSafe web-interface and detailed are ships displaying their associated OWS Discharge Reports.

Note that ships are colour-coded to represent the discharge status:

green = ok,
yellow = pre-alarm
red = illegal discharge

The discharge status information including ship position and associated date/time is transmitted to the secure Purple finder server via the Inmorsat D+ network. In case of an illegal discharge the server has additionally been configured to route the exception report to email, fax and mobile phone

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