Process networks beat the downturn
1 May 2010
PI, the umbrella organisation for the Profibus and Profinet networking technologies for automating discrete and process manufacturing plants, has revealed that both systems continued to increase their usage in 2009.
Profinet, the industrial Ethernet technology from PI, continued its growth trend with 500,000 newly purchased devices, 8.7% above prior-year levels, and increased the installed base to 2.1 million devices.
Jörg Freitag, PI chairman, commented: “Our Ethernet-based solution offers the user a significant added-value that is increased even further by the new energy savings profile Profienergy.”
The Profibus device total increased to 31.4 million in 2009, a rise of 11% despite the effects of the economic recession. Of this total, 5.4 million devices are now being used in process automation applications.
The number of Profisafe devices sold last year equalled the 220,000 sold in 2008, bringing the installed base up to 850,000.
Meanwhile, the rival Fieldbus Foundation organisation held its annual general assembly in Houston, Texas in March with the general theme of “Asset Management Made Easy”.
Welcoming delegates, Emerson Process Management ’s John Berra, chairman of the foundation, reassured his audience of FF users and potential users by stating: “After 15 years, we can emphatically say that the technology works.”
More convincing proof of this was provided in the keynote address by B R Mehta, senior vice president of Reliance Industries, the petrochemical, oil and refinery group, whose Jamnagar refinery and petrochemical plant in a special economic zone in western India was the country’s first to implement FF technology. It now has over 15,000 tags connected to 3,657 FF segments, including, for example, over 1,200 temperature multiplexers.
The unit, which produces 1.24 million barrels of oil daily, is the largest FF installation in the world, and the largest current implementation of an Invensys IA control system.
Reliance wanted to take advantage of the interchangeability and interoperability built into fieldbus, allowing the use of best-in-class instruments and controls. The chemicals company has incorporated barriers from suppliers such as MTL Instruments, Pepperl + Fuchs and Stahl into a single junction box, and has proved interoperability between all devices and the IA system in fully loaded segments.
