Market Success Touted at PI NA Meeting

Customers who have implemented Profibus and/or Profinet are always featured keynoters. And this year was no exception.

Mike Bastian, Controls Engineering Manager at Ford Power Train discussed his standardization, flexibility, acceleration strategy. Profinet became the backbone of his strategy. He stated that standardization on Ethernet and Profinet helped drive controls standardization giving Ford better "control" over its drive train manufacturing operations.

Stefan Gallmann, Head of Industry Management, Windenergy, discussed how wind turbines are actually quite complex machines inside, and that when linked in a wind park, have considerable communication requirements. Implementing Profinet greatly simplified the network architecture of a typical wind turbine and the entire park.

Following up two user presentations from day one, Jim Simmons of DuPont presented one of the best, down-to-earth implementation discussions I've heard in my 14 years as an editor. And, despite this being a Profibus conference, he was frank in his evaluations and wound up implementing a mixed fieldbus system.

He was doing controls at DuPont when the company wanted to build a facility at its Fayetteville works to produce PVF polymer in 2005. The project came in $5 million under budget and 2.5 months ahead of schedule. That, in itself, is a miracle. Prior to him, someone had chosen Siemens PCS7 as the preferred DCS system, so he stayed with that.

Simmons had little knowledge of fieldbus networks at the time, but he decided to investigate them to see if they would help his controls implementation. He did a thorough analysis of potential networks. "There are many," he deadpanned. His analysis began with looking at categories of devices--instrumentation, automated block valves, analytical devices, motors/drives and remote I/O. He then looked at the requirements for each category.

The result was Profibus PA for instrumentation (it worked well with the PCS7), AS-i for the block valves, Profibus DP or Modbus for most of the rest. The company standard for variable frequency drives was Rockwell Automation, and those devices talk DeviceNet. So he used an Anybus connector from HMS to connect Profibus DP to DeviceNet.

Some of the benefits DuPont realized included advantages of initial installed cost, plant flexibility, reduced time for project execution and time for ongoing plant changes.

Simmons concluded that there was not one perfect fieldbus for every possible application, so engineers should select wisely per design requirement. However, engineers should have to justify NOT using fieldbus on a project.