Automation is becoming more and more prevalent in today’s industrial and utility environments, mostly due to plants moving away from serial and point to point connections between devices and instead changing over to Ethernet. Due to the open standards in Ethernet, vendors of IEDs and RTUs are starting to include Ethernet interfaces in all their newer devices, but what about the older legacy devices currently in play? Due to the cost involved in upgrading a whole site to Ethernet, it can become unfeasible to do the upgrade all at once, however when upgrading over time care must be taken to maintain communications between different vendors devices.
Prior to Ethernet becoming the common choice for industrial and utility networks vendors would use proprietary protocols for communications with their devices. In a lot of cases this meant that newly built mines/sites/substations would contain only a single vendors IEDs/RTUs. However at times an engineer may need to add a device from a different vendor (For instance if new machinery/devices were required that were not available from the original vendor). In a completely proprietary network this could cause serious problems as different vendor’s devices would not be able to communicate amongst each other.
The same problem would be encountered when upgrading an older network to Ethernet, as legacy devices would not even have Ethernet ports. For these kind of problems RuggedCom has a multitude of options available.
For the simple task of allowing a non-Ethernet device to communicate across an Ethernet network one can use a serial device server, a device which encapsulates serial data within an Ethernet packet for transfer across the Ethernet network. This data could either be read by a PC running special software that creates virtual serial ports which re able to read the encapsulated serial data directly, or a second serial device server could be used to “unpack” the serial data out of the IP packets and allow connection directly to the devices serial port. To the end devices this encapsulation will be completely transparent.
However in the case of different vendor’s proprietary devices encapsulation alone will not allow communication, as the end devices would not understand each others language. For this reason we require a translator!
RuggedCom has recently released the eLAN product family to address a wide range of communications and data integration issues from substation to control room, and into the enterprise. Each product in the eLAN family is focused on a specific application within the communication infrastructure.
H3iSquared Trading
Tel: +27 (0)11 454 6025
Email: info@h3isquared.com