Graham Moss, general manager of Elpro Technologies Pty Ltd visited CONTROL's editorial offices yesterday. When we think of world class automation companies, we don't always think of a company whose address is Billabong Street. Yet Elpro Technologies is one of the two automation companies with Australian roots who have been successful in becoming global companies. The other is, of course, Citect, whether they become part of Siemens or not.
Elpro is about 20 years old, and grew out of the SCADA business in Australia. Most people don't realize how prevalent SCADA systems are in Australia, but both Elpro and Citect grew out of the necessity to send critical performance data very long distances over sometimes quite desolate landscapes. Australia has a lot of SCADA, and Elpro was one of the Australian pioneers of what was then called radiotelemetry, and which is more commonly known now as "wireless I/O."
According to Moss, Elpro's business has shifted over the past ten years from being concentrated in utilities and municipal SCADA systems to being concentrated in process automation. He says that the wireless i/o, the wireless data modems and the widespread use of Elpro's wireless gateways, forms a kind of "wireless informatoin backbone" that permits end-users and integrators to connect a wide variety of vendor's products together. "Some vendors frown on this," he said. "For example, Siemens isn't happy with us. In order to integrate their PLCs together, they want you to buy an expensive Profibus Master PLC, as well as the inexpensive slave PLCs. So some intrepid Siemens customers have been using our Profibus Master Gateway, and hooking up all their slave PLCs as a P2P (peer to peer) network, and not buying the expensive part."
Moss went on to say that Elpro's crystal ball had been cloudy about wireless ethernet, but they think that wireless HART will be different.
Even though Elpro is one of the most active participants in the ISA SP100 wireless standard effort, Moss believes that the HART Communications Foundation, with their excellent timing and recognized standard, will be able to become the defacto standard in wireless industrial plant communications.
"First it will be wireless handheld communicators," he says, "especially when the manufacturers start sticking a Wireless HART chip in every instrument and sensor by default. Then they'll start to see what else they can do with it. It won't be an overnight revolution, just like HART and Foundation Fieldbus and Profibus haven't been overnight revolutions to begin with."
And when will Elpro have a HART Wireless Gateway for sale? "About six months after the HART Foundation produces the final copy of their specification," Moss opined.
What Moss sees is that eventually the cost of wireless chips will be so low that every sensor will automatically come with one...and this will lead to the use of many more sensors, and putting sensors on vessels and equipment that have never been cost effective to instrument.
And there's the rub. Once single nodes become meshes, and mesh networks start covering the plants, because of interference and traffic loading, there will be some nodes that get all the traffic, because they are easier to "see" on the network, and other nodes that won't, either because they are shielded, or exposed to too much interference. These nodes will work like hallways, or freeways do, and packet congestion will slow down and maybe even stop performance. "Multiple layer networks will be part of the answer," Moss says.
What about security and reliability? Is wireless ready for prime time? Moss points out that security is more talked about than practiced. "We've had security features for years, but less than 10% of our customers use the security features we already offer. People talk one way, and buy another."
"What will be more important," Moss offers, "is reliability. As we move forward, it will be reliability and downtime issues that will be most important to wireless applications. We may see wireless SIS (safety instrumented systems) but they won't be widely adopted, and we will not see wireless use widespread in critical control applications ever."
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