Wireless advantages in Industry
Wireless technologies have been proven to be advantageous in several industries. According to
Automation World, companies have reported substantial savings by using wireless handheld devices. Maintenance productivity has been reported as being
twenty percent or better when handheld devices are used due to the reduction in paperwork. It saves time and money when technicians in the field can remotely retrieve information to help them do their jobs. Companies have also discovered that technicians in the field can use handheld devices to remotely download pertinent data or create work orders. This saves time versus having to write it down, and waiting for someone to enter the data or work order in the system. As the old saying goes, time is money.
British Petroleum projects a savings of $1 million per year by providing operators with handheld devices.
Mt. Olive Pickle Co. Inc. (MOP), the largest privately held pickle company in the U.S., has reported a savings of
$80,000 by using wireless voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) phones instead of upgrading their walkie-talkie based system.
Siemens Energy & Automation Inc., in Alphareta, GA, installed the wireless network for MOP. MOP also uses handheld devices from
Symbol Technologies in Holtsville, N.Y. Just by eliminating their paper-based work order system, MOP expects to save about $1 million over the next three years.
These are just a couple examples of companies that are saving time and money by incorporating handheld wireless technology. Several other companies around the world report substantial savings when using mobile devices.
Labels: Networking
Lightning Season
This is the time of year when most of us worry the least about our biggest nemesis, lightning. Although winter is the the least likely time that lightning is apt to do its dirty deed, spring is just around the corner. While lightning can strike at any time, the season peaks in most areas around May to June.
While lightning is often described as an act of God, there is still a lot we can do to minimize and prevent damage. Most of the damage caused by lightning is not caused by a direct hit to the equipment involved, but from the eddies and offshoots as the massive energy source seeks to discharge itself into the the earth.
Prevention requires a three prong attack. The first is grounding, the next is isolation, and the third is surge protection.
- Probably the most important item in lightning protection is grounding. Neutrals should be grounded before the power enters the building. Some systems specify very distinct grounding schemes. Foxboro's Foxnet systems specify separate AC and DC grounds. Building grounding should be checked by a qualified electrician at least once a year. Communication cables should be should be grounded per spec, typically one end only. The installation manual is your friend.
- If possible all copper communication that enter or leave a building should be replaced with fiber optic cable where ever possible. While field wiring isn't easily replaced by fiber, twisted pair fieldbus and standard ethernet wiring is easily replaceable with standard components and fiber cable. Sometimes it makes sense to replace some of the cabling between cabinets within the same building. Running fiber between cabinets on short runs can isolate the lightning hit damage to one cabinet.
- Surge protection devices can protect the equipment from surges coming down a power line from a hit miles away. Unfortunately we may not be as protected as we would like to believe. Most surge protection devices depend on MOVs. These devices are limited in the protection that they provide and occasionally will actually catch on fire. A big limitation on them is that each time they are activated, they are weakened, so one never really knows just how much protection an MOV has left. A company called Zero Surge provides state of the art surge protection devices. The company's protection devices use blocking methodology instead of trying to shunt away the excess energy. The blocking technology uses phase shifting to effectively blocks high speed, high energy pulses from the line supply. While these surge protectors may seem pricey, they do promise to give real protection instead of possible protection to mission critical and expensive equipment. Zero Surge's FAQ explains:
There are basically two types of powerline surge technology, patented Series Mode and the older Shunt Mode (so-called hybrids are usually Shunt Mode). The Shunt Mode technology was developed over thirty years ago to protect standalone equipment, but this older technology is no longer suitable for modern sensitive interconnected equipment.
Shunt Mode suppressors are still very common because this older technology is inexpensive to manufacture with high profit margins, and as long as people can be seduced by the low prices, these products will continue to be sold. They generally divert powerline surges to the safety ground wire, using circuits described as "All Three Modes of Protection". The resulting surges diverted to the ground wire can exceed 1000 volts, exposing sensitive motherboards and data boards to surge disruption, degradation and damage.
This surge voltage on the ground wire varies along the length of the wire. When equipment such as modems, printers and other computers is interconnected, the interconnecting cable creates a "ground loop". If the surge induced on the safety ground wire of one computer is 1000 volts and the surge induced on the safety ground wire at another location is 600 volts, then the difference of 400 volts is fed into the interconnecting cables causing the disruption, degradation, or damage.
While large surges will cause damage, small surges can result in data problems such as lock-ups, data errors, and "mysterious problems".
It is better to avoid Shunt Mode surge suppressors that claim "All Three Modes of Suppression" than to try and live with the problems they cause when they divert surges to the ground wire.
Defending against lightning is real preventive maintenance and can be a real downtime and money saver. If you would would like more information or to purchase real surge protection devices drop us an
email. We can assist in inspection and in providing the proper hardware.
Finding the Hot Spots
It can be helpful to find what is heating up, when attempting to repair a piece of equipment. I had an old Army instructor who drilled into our heads, "Whats the first thing you look for after you turn on the equipment?" The answer is "look for smoke and fire." The first step in testing an unknown piece of equipment is to look for smoke and fire. Check for strange smells or a visible wisp of smoke. At the most primitive level we just look for burned components or perhaps some smoke and fire. While this can be destructive, most of the damage is already done by the time we get a chance to open it up and look around.
There are tools to help monitor temperature:
Infrared temperature monitors are real handy. They can find hot spots fast and is an inexpensive solution. We use a couple of inexpensive EXTECH in our shops. A major advantage to these devices is a person does not need to actually make contact with the equipment under test. This is a big advantage when checking out CRT monitors and radio equipment.
- Infrared thermal imaging is another method. Although this method is getting more inexpensive every year, it is still pricey. These devices are great to see all the components that are getting hot and isolating the cause. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case several thousand dollars.
- Another method is thermocouple digital thermometers. These are often available as calibration equipment and are generally inexpensive. We have several in our shops from a high-priced Fluke 724 Temperature Calibrator to an inexpensive Omega 871 thermometer. Generally speaking, a thermocouple can be attached using either kapton or masking tape. A real advantage to thermocouple thermometers is they can be monitored over a period of time. The Omega we use has a milivolt output so that temperature can be monitored and logged over a period of a few days.
Although temperature isn't the first thing a technician thinks of for test equipment, it often is a valuable tool when chasing down intermittent and stability problems.
Labels: Electronics, Troubleshooting
One Step Ahead
After having dug to a depth of 200 meters last year, Scottish scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1000 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 1000 years ago.
Not to be outdone by the Scots, in the weeks that followed, English scientist dug to a depth of 300 meters and shortly after headlines in the UK newspapers read: "English archaeologists have found traces of 2000 year old copper wire and have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network a thousand years earlier than the Scots."
One week later, Texas newspapers reported the following:
"After digging as deep as 5000 feet in West Texas, scientists have found absolutely nothing. They have therefore concluded that 5000 years ago Texas inhabitants were already using wireless technology."
Labels: Humor
Cyber Security for Process Control Systems
In today's process control industry, securing the process control network (PCN) from cyber-related threats is a real issue and a growing concern.
Cyber-related threats pose a significant risk to the security of the process control industry and other industries that are a critical part of our nation's infrastructure. This threat is real and is not just the figment of a paranoid imagination or an episode from Fox's
24. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) takes this concern very seriously. In 2003, the DHS established
US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) to help defend the nation's Internet infrastructure from cyber-attacks. They have instituted the Control Systems Security Program (CSSP), to help the process control and other industries to defend against cyber-threats. In fact,
the Homeland Security Department has teamed with 13 organizations on a 12-month project to secure the process control systems of the nation’s oil and gas industries against cybersecurity threats. The name of this project is (LOGIIC),
Linking the Oil and Gas Industry to Improve Cybersecurity. LOGIIC was birthed out of the Cyber Security Research and Development Center, supported by DHS, and is run by SRI International of Menlo Park, CA. For the first time, LOGIIC, has brought together
government, industry, research labs, security and process control technology vendors to create a real-life process control system test bed. All known cyber-attacks were made against the test bed,
at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. to exploit system vulnerabilities. The goal of LOGIIC is to create technologies that will prevent the exploitation of vulnerabilities in the process control and other vital industries.
According to an article from www.gcn.com,
a cyberattack on the control and data systems of electrical power plants, or oil and gas refineries and piplelines, two of the 17 pieces of the nation's critical infrastructure, could potentially bring the country to a halt. For example, the
Northeast Blackout on April 14, 2003 left 50 million people out of power and the outage cost an estimated $7 to 10 billion dollors, and parts of a pipeline were shutdown. In this example, terrorism was not to blame, but, if terrorists or hackers learned how to shutdown our country's power plants or process control systems, the results could undeniably be devastating to our country.
The DHS has a list of potential attackers on their
web site.
CSSP offers several types of security training to
corporations. The Process Control Systems Forum
(PCSF) is having the 2007 annual meeting on March 6-8 in Atlanta, GA. Four different tracks will be offered which help industries understand the risk and measures to take to reduce the cyber-threat.
The New Sneakernet
First, we had the original sneakernet. Moving files from one computer to the other using the venerable floppy. Some of us remember using 90K floppies, which seemed reasonable enough considering that the microcomputers at the time only supported 64K of memory. Although floppy sizes grew it didn't take long to figure out that floppy disks just didn't have a enough capacity to do the job. Along the way there were Bernoulee drives, optical drives, zip drives and LS 120 SuperDrives. The problem was that the drives were expensive and proprietary, none of the drives ever achieved a real acceptance among most users. CDs worked somewhat. They have 720 Megs of storage and the media is relatively cheap. The problem is that burning to them is time consuming and requires special software that isn't always compatible. Anyone who has burnt CDs have been a victim to Nero, or the Adaptec/Roxio suites. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It never seems to work correctly when you are in a hurry and is troublesome if you want to run real applications that might need real read write access. Even RW CDs are primarily a write once and read many times media.
Flash memory disks are nothing new. PCMCIA flashcards have been around forever and have a standard interface in most laptops. We at PCO installed a flashdrive run system in
MEPS 2. A bootable flash drive using DOS 6.22 and another drive that accepted flash cards. It held the programs, experiment procedures, and the collected data. A sneakernet in its finest hour.
USB thumb drives have evolved with the realization on how handy Digital camera memory can be. They are getting cheaper every day. It used to be that laptops were taken everywhere along with a box heaped full of floppies. The Texas heat and humidity helped assure that the files could be read from the floppies only every once in a while. The Laptop assured that I had all my utilities well in hand and carting it around was pretty good for body building. It also had my email programs with my contact information. Handheld PCs, a Personal Information Manager, work pretty good, but they don't work well for sneakernet functions.
USB thumbdrives are a good method of moving files around and can be a powerful tool. For instance:
- We enter a control room and the Unix based system needs to have some of its configuration and script files restored. We ask to borrow a networked PC. I plug in a USB drive.
- Open up Firefox, Thunderbird, or a FTP program on the USB drive. Fetch the file into my thumb drive.
- Unzip the file and use the command file2disk.exe to make a tared floppy.
The significance in this situation is the fact that I only needed to bring a thumbdrive into the control room and maybe a blank floppy. No tools I used left a footprint and there was no install process, because all the programs are "portable" (meaning there is no installation procedure, no writing to the registry, and no passwords are left behind).
A good place to start looking for portable programs would be at PortableApps.com. A suite of programs can be found there and a whole pile of other applications. Most notably OpenOffice.org Portable. This is a full featured office suite capable of presentations, spreadsheets, word processors and more compatible MS Office documents. It's free and can be compared to high priced applications.
An invaluable tool to me is Calc98, This is a scientific calculator that not only has any practical function I am ever going to use but has a great units conversion feature.
File2dsk & dsk2file Useful for storing Tarred Diskettes to PC files and back again. These are command line programs.
There are also versions of Thunderbird, and Firefox.
These days I find my self running around with a few thumbdrives in my pocket. Some for data backups, a couple for specific software installs, a couple to run a few utilities while "borrowing" a computer, and even a couple for crash recovery.
Labels: Computing
