Emerson’s Klaus Erni and a staff member from a leading pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical manufacturer teamed up to present How Latest Ethernet Technology Helped in a Fieldbus Migration Project at the 2023 Emerson Exchange Immerse Conference. Here is their presentation abstract.
Ever thought of upgrading your existing 2-wire Profibus PA Fieldbus Installation to the next level to be able to either expand the existing installation in an easier way or just to gain more comfort while exchanging Field Devices, so you don’t have to spend hours of work in the night on Addressing and other Field Device Settings before the new Field Device will finally start to communicate with DeltaV? A different Driver for this thought process could be that you may want to use newer Devices with Ethernet connectivity in the near future in a mix with your current 2-wire Profibus PA Fieldbus Installation, as these Ethernet Devices will be able to deliver more Data and Diagnostic Information to DeltaV than your 2-wire Profibus PA Fieldbus Device will.
They opened by discussing the project background. The drying section of the plant was running a PLC system running the clean-in-place operations that they wanted to migrate to DeltaV. Instrumentation was connected to a Profibus PA network. They wanted to migrate from the Profibus network to Profinet and Ethernet-APL for much higher bandwidth. The Advanced Physical Layer (APL) enables 2-wire high-speed 10Mbps communications and power between devices and an APL switch. The APL switches can be configured in a ring to provide an alternative path in case of communication losses between switches. The devices are connected to the APL switch in a star topology (single device to switch).
For the project, they integrated the Profinet protocol over the Ethernet-APL network via PROXY technology—one GSD(ML) with all PA profiles. Device identification is via the port connection, and PA device address settings are not required—the same Fieldbus Type A cable as with APL.
The PA devices needed to be updated to version 3.02 for the migration to ensure they worked properly in getting automatically assigned in the DeltaV system. Other than the PA devices, other discrete inputs and outputs needed to be moved over to the DeltaV system. Some of the older temperature and flow transmitters needed to be replaced to communicate reliably.
The PA Segment Protectors and couplers were replaced with the APL switches.
Here is the DeltaV and Profinet Network diagram.
This manufacturer looks to standardize field communications on Ethernet APL-compatible field devices as they become available and connected to APL communications switches. For I/O, they will use the DeltaV PK controller with CHARMS I/O and the Ethernet APL switch from Pepperl+Fuchs. They are excited about making greater use of this important APL standard as it becomes more widely adopted by suppliers and manufacturers across industries.
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