HART Communication Covers the World

By Ron Helson, Executive Director, HART Communication Foundation

Today's challenging global economic environment continues to place more and more emphasis on the need for cost-efficient process and asset management improvements to keep process manufacturing facilities relevant, competitive and sustainable. The best response to this economic challenge is to look at your process control systems and installed assets in a totally different way.

For 20 years, the HART Communication Protocol has evolved and grown, establishing an infrastructure that offers a cost-effective, reliable, easy-to-use and low-risk field communication solution for process measurement, control and asset monitoring/management. This worldwide HART ecosystem now extends into wireless technology with WirelessHART providing new communication paths for real-time process information, diagnostics and asset performance measures.

Wireless HART is Here and Ready for You!

WirelessHART is the first simple, reliable and secure wireless communication standard for process monitoring and control applications (IEC 62591Ed. 1.0). WirelessHART builds on the proven HART Communication Protocol standard, providing the same rigorous, compliance-verified interoperability to meet your process automation requirements. Plus, it is backward-compatible and future-proof with your existing HART devices and systems—protecting your investment and assuring that current and future devices will work together.

With WirelessHART, additional process and asset performance measurements can be installed for temporary (troubleshooting) or permanent applications with few or no wires – greatly reducing both installation cost and time. The cost savings are so dramatic that WirelessHART could be the solution to getting your projects approved because it uses so much of your existing infrastructure and, in most cases, can be installed with minimal process disruption.

HART and WirelessHART communication solutions can help you lower costs, improve operations and optimize assets. The articles in this edition will help you understand how and show you that there is no need to wait! HART Communication, both wired and wireless, will help you save money for your plant and your company now.

So if you're looking to upgrade your plant for sustainable and globally competitive operation…for today and for the future…look to products and solutions based on the international standard – HART Communication – because HART covers the world of process automation.