For many people, spring is the time of renewal, hope and optimism. Me? Well, I’ve always been one for autumn. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of my school days and the promise of a new year? Who knows, but this time of year always gets me looking toward the immediate future.
While U.S. voters get ready to attach their future hopes to one candidate or the other as the presidential election reaches the height of what I can only describe as the strangest election of my lifetime, I’ve turned my attention to more tangible promises of better days ahead. There's optimism around emerging networking technologies in the process control industry, and companies are preparing to make their choice for the future in that regard.
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In August, I moderated a webinar with a pair of experts from Beckhoff USA on “How smarter I/O can help optimize operations,” and as you might expect, the subject of remote I/O was prominent in the discussion. Of course, central to future optimization plans is the ability to more efficiently network and manage field devices from nearly anywhere, and one emerging technology that's excited operators is Ethernet-Advanced Physical Layer (APL) protocol.
As Emerson’s Jonas Berge states in this issue’s Other Voices column, many industrial operators can envision a single Ethernet-APL cable infrastructure that supports all kinds of field devices, not just instrumentation. But, as with all good things, they’ll have to wait. The transition to pure APL is still some years away, and Berge reports even greenfield sites are still being built with a mix of APL and 4-20 mA instrumentation.
However, this hasn’t stopped vendors from getting the word out. This month, Endress+Hauser, Pepperl+Fuchs, Phoenix Contact and Vector will host an educational summit in Houston, Texas, proclaiming Ethernet-APL “not just another fieldbus.”
Will Ethernet-APL ultimately prove be the solution that operators and vendors think it will? Only time will tell. Ethernet-APL isn’t the only game in town, but its promise is intriguing. While expectations for Ethernet-APL were tempered since it first came into the spotlight and the realities of its full adoption sunk in, it seems primed to see another bump in its approval ratings.
