Eaton Corporation is expanding connectivity options for the SmartWire-DT panel wiring system, a control panels technology and process that make panel construction easy. Replacing numerous wires used to connect motor control components with a single cable, the SmartWire-DT system is now available to North American customers with Ethernet/IP and Modbus TCP, in addition to PROFIBUS-DP and CANopen. This added flexibility allows the SmartWire-DT system to more easily integrate with original equipment manufacturer’s (OEMs) preferred industrial network.

The SmartWire-DT panel wiring solution uses an eight-conductor, flat cable located in the control cabinet to connect motor starters, pushbutton actuators, and indicator lights. The start of the system is a SmartWire-DT gateway, which establishes the connection to standard programmable logic controller (PLC) fieldbuses, now including Ethernet/IP and Modbus TCP, as well as PROFIBUS-DP and CANopen.

“Eaton is helping customers make their processes more competitive with Lean solutions designed to dramatically reduce the assembly and commissioning time, while maintaining or improving the quality of the control system,” said Richard Chung, Eaton product manager. “By replacing complex wiring inside control cabinets, the SmartWire-DT system automates, simplifies and expedites connecting control panel components – establishing a new level of efficiency, accuracy and reliability. Further, with the addition of Ethernet/IP and Modbus TCP connectivity, the SmartWire-DT system provides versatile connectivity options – integrating with a broad range of customers’ choice protocols. ”

The Sercos vendor organizations have released an update to the specification for the Sercos III Real-time Ethernet solution.

The V1.3 specification broadens the functionality and the range of applications of the international Sercos real-time standard, while considering new trends in machine and plant construction. The extensions are fully compatible with the existing specification so that the high level of standardization and the best possible interoperability of devices from different manufacturers can be ensured.

Following the lead of electronic drives, hydraulics and pneumatics are turning more and more towards digitally controlled modules. This increases flexibility and shifts tasks previously solved by mechanical means to software solutions. The Sercos organization recognizes the importance of this trend and has extended the existing Sercos drive profile such that electric, hydraulic and pneumatic drives now are supported across different technologies.

Two new profiles have been added to the Sercos specification. The energy profile defines parameters and commands for the reduction of the energy consumption in a uniform and vendor-independent manner. An encoder profile makes the interface of absolute and incremental encoders available to all devices on a Sercos network.

The following new services are specified at the protocol level: oversampling and time-stamping. The oversampling procedure allows the acquisition and transmission of equidistant values faster than the configured bus or connection cycle. This increases the process control intricacy in extremely time-critical applications, such as laser applications, because it allows more data to be collected and command values to be communicated at a faster speed. Measurement methods are integrated directly into the protocol, thereby making it possible to access these mechanisms across different manufacturers and independently of the product.

In addition, the specification defines a time-stamping procedure for the event-triggered acquisition of values with corresponding time stamps, as well as the time-triggered activation of command values. This function is event-controlled, promptly transmitting defined events such as certain measurement values to the controller and switching outputs independently from the clock cycle. This increases process stability in complex solutions such as those needed in semiconductor or solar manufacturing.

The specification update is completed by an installation guide that specifies cabling with copper wire and optical fiber, each in consideration of IP20 and IP65/67 protection classes.

SErial Realtime COmmunication System, in short Sercos, is among the leading digital interfaces for communication between controls, drives and decentralized peripheral devices. Sercos has been used in machine engineering for more than 25 years and is implemented in over 3 million real time nodes. With its Ethernet-based open, manufacturer independent architecture, Sercos III is a universal bus for all automation solutions.

For additional information, please visit www.sercos.com or www.sercos.de/en.

The market for industrial networking is still strong according to a new report from IMS Research, an independent provider of market research and consultancy. An estimated 31 million new fieldbus and Ethernet nodes were installed worldwide in 2011; this number is forecast to grow by an average of 10% a year, to just over 45 million new connected nodes in 2015.

The report, “The World Market for Industrial Networking – 2011 Edition”, forecasts that, in EMEA and the Americas, new connected nodes will grow fastest in servo and inverter drives. Their grow rate will be 11.8% a year, resulting in 3.5 million inverter drives and 0.8 million servo drives being connected to a network in 2015.

“These new network nodes will grow so fast because of the high growth in shipments of servo and inverter drives” explains Graham Brown, a market analyst. “Drive shipments are growing quickly in all regions, although the industry sectors creating this growth differ by drive type and region. The adoption of medium-voltage drives, for example, is growing in the oil and gas industry; growth in shipments of servo drives is in the machine-tool industry.”

While shipment growth is a key factor, IMS Research is also seeing a steady increase in the percentage of drives that are network-enabled and connected. The current focus on improving energy efficiency in factories is largely due to the potential reduction in running costs it offers; this may also be legislated in the coming years. Networked drives offer an effective means of improving overall factory efficiency;  the number of new networked drives will likely increase by a substantial amount if such legislation is introduced. However, this is not likely to happen before 2015.

Many more networked drives are forecast to be shipped in Asia Pacific, partly because of many new greenfield projects. IMS Research projects that there will be about 4.3 million new servo and inverter drives networked in this region; equating to a growth rate of well over 15% a year, significantly above the world average rate.

“This is not surprising.” commented Brown. “Since 2009, several countries in Asia, especially China, have enjoyed strong economic growth. Heavy spending on industrial and infrastructure projects means that markets for several industrial products, particularly operator terminals and industrial PCs, are also growing quickly at over 14% a year. This suggests that the strong growth already seen in automation and in turn industrial networking in Asia Pacific is likely to continue.”

This month, DrivesMag asked North American process chemical plant designers and facility managers about their facilities and process lines. The answers to the question: What communication method do you use in your plants/processes? return some interesting insights into automation and control networks and the systems that define their work. Users were able to choose more than one answer and were given the choice of "other", but rarely selected it.

This research has a confidence factor of 90% and a confidence interval of 10%.

Use of Ethernet-based technologies in industrial communications will grow faster than use of fieldbus, especially in the Asia-Pacific region; according to IMS Research. This is largely driven by the need to improve efficiency as currency and wage pressures sound warning bells, threatening the cost advantage that has fueled the meteoric growth of manufacturing in the region. The company says that  worldwide growth in the installation of new Ethernet based nodes was forecast to be 13% CAGR from 2010 to 2015; regional growth rates were 11% in EMEA, 10.4% in the Americas, 18.6% in Asia Pacific.

John Morse, company representative, said “...the rate of growth seems to be gathering pace in the recovery from the 2008/9 recession. The Asia-Pacific growth rate is high despite the pressure on local manufacturing costs from increasing wages in the growing economies of Asia, most notably China. In addition, the demand for products from both America and Europe is currently slowing, adding an additional threat to the economies of scale needed to maintain profitability.”

Morse added “The market in Japan is somewhat different and has been much slower to adopt Ethernet-based communication technologies in industry. Even there, this is changing with the introduction of CC-Link IE, a Gigabit technology form Mitsubishi Electric; and with extensive promotion by other organizations including ODVA and Profibus International promoting Ethernet/IP and PROFINET respectively”.

Sprint Electric will unveil a new lineup of DC drives for control of high current excitation fields on DC motors with new 3 phase field controllers in November at SPS/IPC/Drives in Nuremberg, Germany.

QLX 3 phase field controllers are designed for the high current excitation fields of DC motors used in applications such as a hot rolling mill and steel handling and can be used to add reversing to large DC motors where the facility does not already exist

The QLX uses 3 phase supply power to provide a controlled DC field current. It will work with the armature controller to provide all usual field control functions including field reversal. The model range spans currents from 12 to 2250 Amps, with fully digital control and all the usual communications facilities. , or exists only with contactors. The new offer has a built-in standby field mode and field reversal and auto field weakening functions for high power fields. For start and stop functions, the QLX directly interfaces with the main armature controller such as the PLX.

The QLX 3 phase field controller has the same digital functions as the company's PLX range of DC drives, including field bus options such as Profibus, DeviceNet, CanOpen, Modbus TCP/IP, EtherNet etc.

Strategic Operations, Inc (STOPS) uses a Galil DMC-4080 8-axis Ethernet motion controller and servo drive package in their Ballistic Unmanned Ground Vehicle (BUGV) used in their Hyper-Realistic™ training environments for military, law enforcement and homeland security operations.

Designed for training operations, no live driver sits in the BUGV; just hyper realistic foam mannequins. Real people operate the vehicle via a sophisticated remote control device. Key driving functions are managed by the Galil DMC-4080 8-axis Ethernet motion controller which incorporates two Galil D3040 4-axis, 500 W drives operating at voltages between 20 V and 80 V and peak currents up to 10 A per axis.

Three of the axes of the Galil DMC-4080 control the steering, shifting and throttle actions, while a fourth axis is used for additional steering requirements. Another axis is used for controlling a machine gun mounted inside the vehicle which fires blanks at the trainees. The remaining three axes are reserved for testing and other features. STOPS uses some of the controller input/output (I/O) to operate relays that energize such functions as the ignition or turn signals.

A key factor why STOPS specified the Galil controller is its ability to function with utmost reliability inside a vehicle subject to extremely harsh conditions, like wide-ranging temperatures of -10° C to 65° C; dusty, loose and uneven terrain; real ammunition and explosives; and chemicals. For STOPS, failure is not an option with the controller.

STOPS liked how the Tell Torque feature of the DMC-4080 takes readings from the motor of the BUGV to determine the harshness of the terrain it is on, and then delivers its findings to the remote control “driver” so he can either ease down or rev up the engine accordingly.

“We use Galil’s Position Tracking Mode to send position data streams from the host to the four axes used for driving the BUGV. The data throughput is excellent, with no issues, no latency,” said Kit Lavell, executive vice president for Strategic Operations.

Since 2002, Strategic Operations has provided training to over 450,000 Marines, soldiers, sailors and Coast Guard personnel to prepare them for the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan and other hostile places. For more information about Strategic Operations see www.strategic-operations.com.

Since a sample of respondents in the May edition of “Industrial Ethernet Book” was not statistically accurate, IMS Research is looking again at the data, and will revise survey results in a future edition of the book.

But initial corrections are offered here.

IMS reports that Ethernet TCP/IP continues to remain the dominant Ethernet technology used in factory automation due to extensive use at the plant level, where deterministic delivery of data is not always critical to the system. Considering the Industrial Ethernet variants that are designed to support communication functionality at the lower levels of an automation system, PROFINET enjoys the largest share of nodes in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), while EtherNet/IP is most prevalent in the Americas.

The companies that champion these protocols play a large role. Siemens backs the PROFINET standard and dominates the PLC market in Europe, while Rockwell Automation supports the EtherNet/IP standard and enjoys a similarly strong position in the Americas. IMS Research suggests that PLCs represent the most influential type of automation equipment when dictating the types of protocols being used.

Given this, the company suggests that long-term outlook for the adoption of industrial Ethernet variants will continue to be heavily influenced by the choice of PLC platform in region. Both companies continue to own in excess of 50% of revenues for their respective region, and while they also both compete with great success in each other’s local market, in all likelihood their regional strengths will continue. This factor is reflected in the forecast for 2014 industrial Ethernet usage, where PROFINET is projected to continue to gain strength in EMEA and EtherNet/IP in the Americas.

Libelium is launching Libelium OTA and over the air programming (OTAP) solution for wireless sensor networks, bringing OTA capabilities for the first time to unlicensed frequency bands (2.4GHz, 868MHz, 900MHz) and to low power communication using protocols such as 802.15.4 and ZigBee.

Over the last decade wireless programming or over the air (OTA) provisioning has been widely used by the mobile phone industry. This capability has allowed software updates to be delivered to mobile phone users and to enable the deployment of new services as they become available. So far, such capabilities have not been available to wireless sensor networks or to the so-called "Internet of Things". Such networks, usually consisting of hundreds or thousands of nodes (“motes”), would benefit from an OTA capability.

David Gascón, Libelium’s CTO, says “Motes are often located in places that are either remote or difficult to access. Libelium OTA will enable firmware upgrades to be made over a wireless network without the need of physical access”. He adds, “The new OTAP feature, together with battery recharging via a solar panel, will keep the maintenance costs of wireless sensor networks to a minimum allowing the deployment of networks with thousands of nodes”.

Firmware upgrades can be made within minutes and it is possible to choose between updating single nodes (unicast), multiple nodes (multicast) or an entire network (broadcast). OTA can also be used for the recovery of stuck nodes. Furthermore it is possible to find nodes in a particular area by broadcasting a discovery query.

Libelium OTA can work with both direct- and multihop-access. In the case of 802.15.4 networks, the nodes to be upgraded can be accessed directly by the gateway. With ZigBee, it is usual that a series of nodes must forward packets sent by the gateway to the chosen destination. When performing OTA with direct access the frequency channel used in the 2.4GHz band is changed so no interferences are caused to the rest of the nodes.

The Libelium OTA provides two levels of security: - firstly the data transmitted  is encrypted using the AES-128 algorithm; secondly a pass key must be authenticated in each node before the OTA process starts.

For wireless sensor networks implemented with Waspmote, programs sent are stored in a 2GB SD card enabling thousands of different software versions to be stored and managed on a single mote. The management OTA application runs in Windows, MacOS and Linux and it is freely available for clients of the Waspmote platform.

The first public demonstration of Libelium OTA will be performed from 6th-8th June 2011 on booth #500 at the Sensors Expo & Conference in Rosemont, IL, USA.

With IndraLogic XLC (eXtended Logic Control), Rexroth presents a new family of PLC controllers whose capabilities go far beyond the familiar PLC standard functions. Users can leverage a wide range of new functions that achieve modular software projects quicker than before. All planning, configuration, programming and diagnostic functions are standardized in one single engineering environment. Flexible motion control functions are already integrated. IndraLogic XLC can be connected into different communication networks thanks to real-time communication via SERCOS III and other common communication interfaces.

The IndraLogic XLC PLC family enables scalable, controller-based and embedded PC solutions in conjunction with the company’s latest IndraControl device platform. Industrial PC-based hardware variants will round off the device portfolio in 2011.