Belden has installed a wireless local area network (WLAN) process control solution for Shell's Petrochemical plant in Singapore proving its capability to offer a complete solution for scalable, redundant LAN and WLAN architectures for process industries. This is said to be the first time in the oil & gas industry that wireless technology has been deployed to get mobile access to the process control system. When planning the project, Shell wanted to get mobile access to all process data via WLAN at defined places in the refinery to drive efficiencies. Peter Beerepoot, who was responsible for instrumentation process control of the entire project for Shell Eastern Petroleum, says: "We were given the opportunity to develop a complete infrastructure. Our initial thoughts during the Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) phase, was that wireless would give us a number of key benefits. So we considered substitution of local panels, which we believed would bring us advantages in terms of cost reduction and increased efficiency."
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