Control News from Europe May 2008

More important, however, than the rights or wrongs of the arguments themselves is the impression they give to the wider audience of potential users. As Walt Boyes points out in his Sound Off blog, (http://www.controlglobal.com/soundoff/index.html) more than two decades of this mud slinging has “left a terrible and lasting bad taste in the mouths of end users worldwide,” many of whom have as a consequence decided to “stick with the venerable 4-20mA DC-wired technology, with a HART overlay.” As evidence, Boyes points to the 26 million HART devices currently installed or shipping compared with 800,000 Foundation fieldbus devices and some 18 million Profibus/Profinet devices, the majority of which will presumably have gone into the factory automation sector. Nor do the repeated assertions from both camps—the one thing they do agree on—that HART can’t be counted as a true fieldbus, help their case; indeed it simply further undermines it. Just because it isn’t a true fieldbus doesn’t change the fact that it is their most formidable and successful competitor.

Bad blood

By continuing to argue over detail, what these two organizations have signally failed to do, even after 20 years, is to make a totally compelling case for the fieldbus concept. Boyes’ concern is that this bad blood will wash over into the wireless world and similarly poison potential users’ impressions of the technology and, hence, drastically reduce its rate of adoption. In that he may be right, although other observers, such as ARC’s Harry Forbes, argue that the advantages of wireless are so compelling that they will override such concerns. More important, in our view, however, is that continual squabbling at this level will increase the rate of adoption of Ethernet right down to the device level, thereby removing the perceived risk previously associated with backing the wrong fieldbus horse, and opening up the market to new contenders. Against that background, and with contenders such as Cisco and Motorola joining the fray, arguments over what is and what is not “parrot marketing” are supremely irrelevant.

The FF travels the road to RIO

The Fieldbus Foundation reports accelerating progress towards the definition of a High Speed Ethernet Remote I/O (HSE-RIO) specification which, it says, will tighten the integration of process instrumentation into its architecture. Describing HSE-RIO as an important step forward, Foundation president and CEO Rich Timoney said “Device networks offer communication capabilities, but do not provide a complete automation infrastructure. Foundation fieldbus delivers process integrity, business intelligence and open, scalable integration in a managed environment, making it a true system infrastructure. Users will realize CAPEX and OPEX benefits from incorporating remote I/O in this technology.” . . . but Profibus PA makes inroads into US

Profibus is set to make a major breakthrough into the North American process market with the news that Siemens has been selected as main automation vendor (MAV) for BASF’s new Joncryl polymer plant at Wyandotte, Mich. Scheduled for completion in 2009, the greenfield project involves more than 5,000 I/O and will be the largest Profibus PA installation in the U.S. with more than 3,000 field devices. It will also be one of the world’s largest applications of redundant fieldbus. The plant will be controlled by a fully redundant Simatic PCS 7 DCS with redundant fieldbus connectivity using active field distributors (AFDs), redundant networks, redundant controllers and redundant HMI servers, clients and batch servers.

Emerson first to take orders for WirelessHART

With all the noise and excitement which has surrounded wireless in general and the WirelessHart—sorry WirelessHART—standard in particular over the past few years, it comes as something of a surprise to find that, up until the middle of March 2008, nobody had actually been selling any WirelessHART products. Despite successive North American and European product launches, most recently in Vienna in November of 2007 it was only on March 17 that Emerson put out a press release claiming it had become “the first process automation supplier to begin taking orders for WirelessHART-enabled products.”

Initially Emerson’s Smart Wireless range of WirelessHART-compliant products includes pressure, flow, level, temperature and vibration transmitters and gateways, along with its AMS Suite predictive maintenance software and 375 field communicator. In the pipeline are pH, discrete and valve position transmitters, the Smart Wireless THUM Communicator which will allow WirelessHART capability to be retrofitted to legacy devices and a DeltaV native wireless interface.

€1.5bn market

Emerson estimates that demand for wireless technology will exceed €1.5bn by 2012, leading Emerson Process Management president John Berra to comment that “In my 39 years in process automation, I have never seen a technology with such compelling, immediate benefits … Wireless simply means a better way to put more eyes and ears in the plant, to enable the plant to run better, safer and greener. This is a truly wonderful day.”

Whether he added “My, oh, my” and burst into song at this point the press release, sadly, does not reveal.

Some of the less usual suspects

While Emerson’s WirelessHART announcement again highlighted its collaboration with Cisco in extending its wireless capability upward and across the enterprise, the extent to which wireless is opening up the process automation market space to new and powerful contenders was further emphasized by the introduction by Motorola of new wireless IEEE 802.11n-compliant wireless local area network (WLAN) solutions aimed at providing practical replacements for wired enterprise networks. These will in turn be supported by new LAN Planner software to aid migration of existing WLANs.