The Who’s Who of the process industry came together at ACHEMA 2015. Numerous innovations could be seen and all participants engaged in lively exchange with scores of customers and interested parties. PROFIBUS and PROFINET International aroused the interest of many visitors with publication of its White Paper “PROFINET – The solution platform for process automation.”
A look at how the industrial application of the Internet of Things concept makes for a very different use of data than the consumer Internet of Things and how Profinet sources the industrial data needed via an open standard.
It should have been called the Industrial Internet of Data. It’s the data that gets saved and analyzed to provide the benefit of improving industrial processes. That data originates in devices like buttons and switches, in complex sensors and actuators, in vision systems, and drives. The data gets manipulated, logic is applied, and control algorithms completed in controllers like PLCs, DCSs, and PACs. From there it emerges in organized fashion to be displayed, stored, and analyzed.
PROFIBUS’s success in the industrial controls universe is partly due to its wide array of diagnostic capabilities. Every PROFIBUS slave device must support, at a minimum, 6 bytes of standard diagnostic data. This data is defined by PROFIBUS and PROFINET International and reports the device state, its controlling master and whether the device has any extended diagnostic data (additional fault information) available.
Snijders Intelligent Automation designs and manufactures electrical panels for many industrial and commercial sectors, including maritime. The Barwon Water biosolids drying facility is a fully enclosed thermal drying operation in Australia. Both are using PROFIBUS to maximize transparency and uptime. (more…)
Did you know that IO-Link wiring needs only 3 wires of a parallel cable instead of 19?
The simple motto 3 instead of 19 wires vividly describes the saving potential of IO-Link compared to conventional wiring. The user benefits are made clear using the example of a passive distributor with 8 M12 connections. For comparison purposes, an IO-Link input module that can be connected to any IO-Link master is used.
Through the first half of 2015 there has been a flurry of activity in the magazine press relating specifically to PROFINET, PROFIBUS and of course IIoT. Here’s a recap of those articles to stay up to date on the latest coverage. (more…)
New training events have been announced in North America for Toronto and Seattle. In Europe, training is being offered across the continent for both PROFIBUS and PROFINET Engineers and Installers. (more…)
PI News from around the world comes from Australia, Italy, and the UK. PI Australia just completed their annual general meeting with positive results; will host a one day PROFINET & PROFIBUS Expo; and announces training courses for later this year. PI Italy had a successful show with an award-winning PROFIenergy paper. PI UK reports on their recent conference.
