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monitor conditions on a pipeline stretching across the desert in Saudi Arabia or the frigid slopes of Alaska. Physical distances may cover hundreds of yards or miles. Instrumentation must operate in areas where lightning may strike, or in the vicinity of hazardous materials. Field instrumentsflow meters, pressure transmitters, valve positioners, and the like that take readings out in the fieldstill widely rely on an analog standard, known as 4-20 milliamp, to communicate signals back to the control room. This has worked fine for nearly three decades, but is limited to communicating a single data value. That is changing with the implementation of fieldbus technology, a digital two-way communications protocol. It is designed to take advantage of intelligent instrumentation equipped with microprocessors to communicate between the field and the control room. Because it can communicate large quantities of data from the field devices, industrial networks tying together fieldbus instruments open the way for complex control and automation tasks. Major players in a range of process industriesoil and gas, food and beverage, pulp and paper, and wastewater treatment, to name just a fewhave embraced fieldbus architecture.
At the Bowater pulp and paper plant in Gatineau, Quebec, which is equipped with PlantWeb field-based architecture, a Fisher valve with Fieldvue digital valve controller provides final control for the pulping area.
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diagnostics. A fieldbus pressure transmitter attached to a line detects an irregular noise, indicating that the line is plugging. It sends a signal to the central controller, identifying the location and supplying detailed diagnostic information to a technician, who can perform the necessary maintenance. Other attractive benefits of fieldbus devices include much lower wiring, engineering, and assembly costs compared with analog systems. What's more, with all that information, it's easier to keep tabs on systems in hazardous conditions.
Two Flavors
There are two fieldbus standards designed for the process industry. One standard, Foundation Fieldbus, is designed to be compatible with the SP-50 standards project of the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society and has strong acceptance in the United States. The other major fieldbus standard is Profibus PA. Profibus, which originated from academic and research institutions in Germany in the 1980s, developed a PA protocol for process automation in 1996. The two standards are mutually exclusive, differing in their architecture and, to some extent, in their applications. While it is true that the standards compete for many of the same installations, proponents of each acknowledge that no single bus technology is best suited for all process applications. Each has its strengths. Foundation Fieldbus, for example, has more intelligence distributed at the device level. Foundation Fieldbus instruments have found strong support among people in the oil refinery and chemical industries, according to Jim Gray, director of marketing for the I/A Series distributed control system at Foxboro Co., a unit of Invensys Process Systems in Foxboro, Mass. Profibus PA is a more centralized control architecture that has found adherents among the water treatment, pharmaceutical, chemical, and food and beverage industries, according to Michael Bryant, executive director of the Profibus Trade Organization in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Foxboro's I/A Series DIN rail mount fieldbus module subsystem is designed for remote field mounting close to the process being monitored and supports different fieldbus protocols.
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The two protocols mark their differences in other areas, such as the way the intelligence is distributed over the network. One advantage of Foundation Fieldbus is its function block capabilities embedded in the devices that allow control at the device level in the field, said Richard Timoney, president of the Fieldbus Foundation in Austin, Texas. According to Tom Wallace, worldwide PlantWeb marketing manager of Emerson Process Management in Eden Prairie, Minn., with Foundation Fieldbus, there is a lot more intelligence in the device itself. "The individual nodes are intelligent," he said. "They have within them a schedule of what is supposed to happen with the bus and the functionality to perform process control in the field." Foundation Fieldbus uses a protocol called publish/subscribe, which will publish informationfor example, a temperature reading that has four subscribersso each device that needs the information will grab it and use it. "It's a very efficient protocol in the amount of bandwidth that is used to do the job," Wallace said. Because the intelligence is distributed in the devices themselves, even if the host goes down, the bus can keep operating, and safe and effective process control can be maintained, he added. Profibus PA is a more centralized control over distributed fieldbus architecture, according to Bryant of the Profibus Trade Organization. Profibus PA is an extension of Profibus DP, a protocol that was designed for the discrete manufacturing market. In Profibus PA, a smart transmitter may be capable of providing high- or low-level warnings, but would not have the intelligence to take over a system or to shut itself down. "It's all programmed through the host control," Bryant said. One advantage of Profibus PA is that it saves on the power budget, because the system does not require large amounts of memory in each instrument. "In the long run, we provide a good solution that is also a cost-effective solution," he said. Bryant said that Profibus PA is positioned as an alternative to Foundation Fieldbus. "Many industries do not require the kind of control that you can get with Foundation Fieldbus," he said. "There is an increased functionality requirement versus a cost requirement." Profibus PA has been used in the oil industry, in operations such as oil blending facilities or offshore drilling platforms. On the other hand, it would not be
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suited for an oil refinery, which has a need for devices capable of taking over a control function from a master control device, or the ability to shut down an operation in an orderly fashion, he acknowledged. According to Todd Hubbell, a systems communications engineer with Endress+Hauser USA in Greenwood, Ind., Profibus offers some advantages in the programmable logic controller environment, because it is easier to use. He said the company sold roughly equal numbers of Profibus PA and Foundation Fieldbus instruments. "Profibus doesn't have function blocks in the device and you don't have to train your operators in that," Hubbell said. "Foundation Fieldbus gives you the ability to do field control. You can look at it both ways." Both bus technologies provide for intrinsic safetya key issue in process plants because process industries often deal with hazardous materials. "If something goes bump in a process plant, it could affect the integrity of the process equipment or be harmful to the environment or to human life," said Wallace of Emerson Process Management. Basically, intrinsic safety means that the power carried on the wires is limited, so that not enough energy is present to cause ignition, even if a fault occurs. A big concern in the process industry is losing communications with the field instruments if there is a short in the cable, according to Bernd Schuessler, product manager of bus systems at Pepperl+Fuchs Inc. in Twinsburg, Ohio. Equipment such as power repeaters create independently isolated bus segments, so that if one bus segment shorts out, other segments will remain up and running, he said.
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The Foxboro Co., for example, covers both bases for process automation, said Jim Gray. Emerson Process Management, on the other hand, has a broad offering in Foundation Fieldbus, although it will supply some of its devices in Profibus PA, according to Tom Wallace. Siemens has a broad portfolio of Profibus products, with a large installed base in Europe and a growing market share in North America. "Profibus is the native bus for our systems, and that is the path forward," said Tanmoy Basu, product manager for fieldbus systems at Siemens Energy and Automation Inc., at Spring House, Pa. However, Basu added that Siemens is a member of both the Profibus Trade Organization and Fieldbus Foundation. Siemens has products in the pipeline that would let customers use the appropriate bus technology in their plants, depending on the automation application.
Device manufacturers often supplement these tests with their own. "It's in our own interest to make sure our devices can talk to everybody
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else's," said Hartmut Wuttig, vice president of technology at ABB Automation Technology Products in Cleveland. According to Wallace of Emerson Process Management, different device manufacturers cooperate in interoperability testing. Emerson conducts tests to ensure that Foundation Fieldbus devices operate on its Delta V host system. The company has agreements with other device manufacturers under which the companies test each other's devices. "The sole purpose is determining how well these products work together, and conditions under which there are problems. This way, problems can be fixed before products reach a customer," said Wallace. In addition to interoperability testing, Emerson applies stress tests, he said. Stress testing involves putting devices under extreme conditions of the bus in heavily loaded configurations, to verify how well they work. Hubbell of Endress+Hauser said he is seeing more and more multivendor installations. "Host testing from Emerson certainly does ensure that the integration of the devices works in the host system," he said.
That began to change with the realization that instruments were becoming smart, with the advent of digital transmission
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in the field, explained Caro, who chaired the SP-50 committee of the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society, which developed the standard for fieldbus. "We started off with the idea that there had to be a digital standard," not something that would be superimposed on top of the 4-20 milliamp standard, he said. The new fieldbus standard incorporated elements of Open Systems Interconnect, or OSI, architecture for digital communications of the International Organization for Standardization, providing physical, data link, basic protocol, and application layers. Although it was originally intended for all application areas, it quickly became focused on process industries after a user layer that is defined in process control terms was added, said Caro. A factory automation layer was never prepared. The SP-50 standard was completed in 1993. Yet implementation of the SP-50 standard was opposed by some members of the International Electrotechnical Commission, an international standards organization, who favored an alternative standard, Profibus. An attempt to reach a compromise fieldbus solution was not really successful, Caro said. A compromise fieldbus standard, called IEC 61158, completed in 1999, was a multipart standard that incorporated eight different bus technologies, including SP-50 and Profibus. "It's a piece of history, of no value," Caro said. "No one in their right minds would build something to include all eight parts." Foundation Fieldbus, established in 1994, implemented SP-50 as a basic process control standard.
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from the beginning," he said. "Customers should pick things that are relatively easy to do. Keep it simple and, as you gain more experience with it, you can step it up."
At a Seagram Americas distillery in Lawrenceburg, Ind., remote process interface devices, from Pepperl+Fuchs, carry signals from a hazardous area, containing vats of alcohol, to a safe area.
There is also training associated with engineering and setting up a fieldbus control strategy, he said. Instruments are traditionally specified late in a project. Because instruments are now an integral part of the control strategy, it's necessary to change the way a project is engineered. Instruments have to be considered earlier, when laying out the control strategy, said Gray. Customers will also need to reconsider plant practices and standards, and perhaps develop new ones that are appropriate to the fieldbus environment, Wallace said. Some tasks will happen in a different order or may take more or less time, making it necessary to rethink project schedules and staffing. Generally, Foundation Fieldbus schedules are shorter and staffing reduced, compared with traditional analog installations.
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environment could erode its cost advantage, he said. "Ethernet is a tremendously valuable thing, but it probably won't make it out to the sensor, because it's not designed to go down that far," he said. Wireless communication is also likely to play a potential role in fieldbus systems. Richard Caro, for one, expects to see wireless communications in the field for certain applications. Wallace sees potential for wireless in data acquisition. He added that issues still needed to be worked out: Electrical storms can interfere with communications and wires must be strung to power the devices.
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