Yokogawa claims ISA100 wireless first

London – Yokogawa Electric Corp. has developed “the world’s first” field wireless devices based on the ISA100.11a industrial wireless communications standard, the company has announced. The products, it said, will be available on the market from July, with trial kits to be included in the offering.

Target areas for the devices are oil & gas, LNG, refining, petrochemicals, chemicals, iron and steel, pulp and paper, power, non-metal/cement, food & beverages, and water/wastewater treatment, said Yokogawa. Applications are expected to include temperature, flow, and differential pressure/pressure measurement in plant processes.

Yokogawa’s initial ISA100.11a products include an EJX-B series differential pressure and pressure transmitter, a YTA series temperature transmitter, and an integrated field wireless gateway which connects field wireless devices with a host system. This can also provide field wireless network setting and management functions in field sensor networks.

“To help companies achieve ever higher levels of productivity, Yokogawa will continue to develop various kinds of field wireless devices for both monitoring and control applications, and is also proposing the development of new field digital networks that integrate wireless and wired technologies,” added a company statement.

According to Yokogawa, wireless networks have seen only limited use to date in industrial automation applications. This, it said, is due to their requirement for advanced technologies that ensure high reliability, real-time response, environmental resistance, and explosion-proof protection, and because of the absence until recently of an industrial communications standard for field wireless devices.

The ISA 100.11a standard addresses these issues by supporting high reliability, a wide range of applications, improved flexibility and network expandability and high compatibility with existing wired systems, Yokogawa believes.

Widespread acceptance of the standard, which has long been championed by Honeywell, is still partly dependent on a coming review by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) – through a subcommittee, the IECSC65C. Other major control & automation vendors, including Emerson, ABB and Siemens are offering devices based on a rival WirelessHart standard, which are already being used in various applications in the process industries.