Wireless connectivity not always a lock

摘要

Fieldbus technologies carry too many unneeded and costly options for this remote monitoring application. Air Liquide is the largest industrial gas manufacturer in the world. The company provides integrated services to its numerous customers in many industries and necessarily has designed a variety of modules—cabinets—and installed them at customers' sites to ensure the optimal quantity and quality of product. These cabinets perform similar and fundamental tasks but also have distinctive characteristics because they serve in different industries ranging from food, glass, steel, and electronics to water treatment and the like. New information technologies can improve the economics of operating and maintaining the cabinets, as field engineers can rely on signals monitored remotely in a frequent manner to inform them when to replace a faulty part, rather than visiting the cabinet periodically even when problems have not occurred. Remote communication also has a big impact on the operation, because this information can continuously update the plant performance. Looking at trends, engineers can diagnose the performance and take actions even before critical limits occur. Finally, one can share the power of using this information with customers for their benefit, increasing their trust and confidence in the provided technology. The new technologies have the general goal of transforming the signals within the cabinets into information available remotely in near to real time to any person involved in the process (while protecting it from unauthorized users). The information generated from different cabinets, within one customer site, or by several customers should be integrated in some type of network and be available on the Internet. Therefore, one aspect of this automation project is to investigate the suitable network that will create the desired connectivity. The other aspect is to identify the tools that will present the information on the World Wide Web. At the same time, we studied wired and wireless networks. Numerous technologies have emerged in the past few years and will continue to do so at a fast pace in the future, and so while we have guidelines for selecting connectivity options based on specific and published needs, the problem becomes more challenging when the needs are more diverse. Here is Air Liquide's (AL's) methodology and the steps we followed in selecting and implementing a complete technological package—software and hardware—that can be added or modified in the cabinets to improve the supervision and monitoring capabilities.