Here I am in Johannesburg South Africa exactly 1 Month before the start of one of the world’s sporting spectacles, the World Cup. The FF South Africa Marketing Committee asked me to come down to present a couple of Foundation Fieldbus seminars to engineers in Johannesburg and another in Cape Town. We have had about 65+ participants per day including some folks who flew in from other countries, so there IS significant interest in digital fieldbus technology in the lower part of Africa AND there are projects on the books to use the newer technologies as well. Some of the questions have also been about how to deploy Fieldbus in different applications such as coal mining (5 km from I/O to interface room), blast furnaces (affect of EMI on H1 please) and of course typical questions related to the interaction/balancing act between number of devices on a network and the update/scan rate/bandwidth to make best use of the installation. Definite signs, that session participants have been fully engaged in the seminars asking these interesting questions for more depth and most importantly – what does this mean to my facility and how I implement the technology.
The organising committee have also included an application of a fructose facility by a local company Tongaat Hulett from engineer Paul Sikhakhane. Paul’s presentation reinforces the message of the day that Fieldbus technology is being used and providing benefits to other countrymen.
It has certainly been worth my while to spend 26 hours each way ‘on the plane’ to help these folks get ‘on the bus.’ Off to Cape Town tomorrow to do a seminar there Thursday and weather permitting go up Table Mountain Friday to watch the Indian & Atlantic Oceans meet.
