MooreHawke Releases Video Promoting TRUNKSAFE Fault-Tolerant Fieldbus System

July 17, 2014
Oil Refinery Shutdown Caused by a Fieldbus Segment Going Down Can Cost Up to $500,000 an Hour

Moorehawk, a division of Moore Industries, has released a video demonstrating how TRUNKSAFE Fault-Tolerant Fieldbus Systemavoids costly shutdowns related to faulty FOUNDATION Fieldbus or PROFIBUS PA segments.

An oil refinery shutdown caused by a fieldbus segment going down can cost up to $500,000 an hour. In the past, the only way for engineers at oil refineries, natural gas sites and other locations to ensure a fault-tolerant, redundant fieldbus solution was to duplicate each piece of the segment including H1 cards, power conditioners, device couplers and field devices. Along with being cost-prohibitive, this method requires special software and complex programming.

The TRUNKSAFE promises to be different. It uses two physical trunk cable “legs” to ensure that no single point of failure will shut down an entire network. The system’s power conditioners immediately detect, report and isolate a faulty fieldbus leg while allowing system communications to continue on the healthy leg. Simultaneously, the TRUNKSAFE Device Coupler detects the absence of DC power on the faulty leg and activates its Automatic Segment Terminator. This allows for normal fieldbus communications to continue while internal blocking circuitry prevents a short-circuit on one leg from affect the other leg.