Rhenac (LEAD) ing the way in turf management

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Horst Theisen talks with a lot of exuberance and is full of zeal. He is the big cheese of Rhenac, Germany, Europe’s first provider of LED turf lighting for professional sports. Rhenac is a company which has a proven expertise with a legacy of innovation.

As he puts in, “We help the groundskeepers and the stadium managers ensure vital, sustainable green turf using advanced technology.”

Horst Theisen is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Rhenac GreenTec AG, a German company specializing in sports turf lighting and pitch management systems. With over 20 years of experience in plant lighting technology and more than 15 years working with the plant scientists, the engineers and the technicians, he is a recognized market leader in lighting solutions for turf growth.

In an exclusive exchange with ‘Coliseum’, Horst Theisen, CEO, Rhenac, Germany, talks at length about turf management. He says that in the last 10 years the associations like FIFA and UEFA have created a lot of requirements to make football better and to provide quality pitch and “that kind of spot functionality requirements is very difficult to handle from the technical point of view available” and Rhenac do exactly that. It also helps to keep the pitch in mint condition.
 

Rhenac

Germany-based Rhenac combines precision engineering with scientific research to deliver the most advanced turf lighting technology available. Developed in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich their Complete Light Spectrum (CLS) system is the only one that replicates natural sunlight – ensuring healthier, denser sports turf with greater efficiency.
 

Advantage LED

A full-of-beans Horst Theisen stated, “Rhenac is a German company. We produce plant growth chambers and grow light systems for plant researches and for scientific programs. We do the tailor-made solutions, the customized solutions and we do that for more than 15 years. We did already for 300 walking chambers, designed hundreds of different grow lights, always providing lighting technology that allows the researchers to look deeper into the growth process of a plant. In 2010, we decided to look deeper into the state-of-the-art technology of the light-emitting diode (LED) and we saw that it could be a game-changer because in the past the growth chambers what we realized were equipped with air-condition system, they were equipped with monochromatic lights, high-processed sodium lights and we realized that by splitting the lights with LEDs and monochromatic ways with blue, yellow, orange, green and red and maybe UV lights we can speed up the research. And it really speeds up.”
 

Balanced Recipe

He added, “We need to have the right light in terms of the light recipe, in terms of the light intensity, and we need to give the plants what it needs in terms of the different light parameters – blue light for vegetation, red light for germination. How we can balance these parameters in a way that we have one parameter which is important for the red light, intensity for the right light quality. Now, if we have developed such a technology the question is how we can grow a technology for grow lights which are 100 percent under artificial conditions plus if we go into a multipurpose arena there is no place to install the pitch if they want to have a different event like football then they might store these pitches in different way outside or underneath the stadium. This is a very complex situation and we need to bring all these things together and that’s why we decided we want to have vitality in the middle point of everything and we want to have everything flexible.”
 

Wrap-up

Rhenac has installed the Digitised Turf Management System with sensors which allow them to keep a tab on the leaves and to interact with them. It also helps them to know the pitch conditions.

Horst Theisen wrapped up by stating, “The future of Turf is LED.”

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