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Last updateSun, 04 Feb 2024 4am
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ABB to provide wireless network supporting smart meter roll-out in Memphis USA

ABB has been selected to provide wireless network products and services to support the deployment of smart meters across the City of Memphis, Tennessee, in the US. The introduction of smart meters is expected to improve efficiency of electricity, water and gas supplies and mitigate loss and theft. The wireless network will support advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) communications, covering an area of around 2030 square kilometers (sq km) and will collect data from nearly 1 million smart meters.

“Our advanced wireless solution will support the deployment of smart metering infrastructure and enable more efficient distribution of electricity, water and gas to the citizens of Memphis,” said Massimo Danieli, Managing Director of ABB’s Grid Automation business unit, a part of the company’s Power Grids division. “This is another example of how ABB is facilitating the increased automation of power networks to enable a smarter grid – a key element of our Next Level strategy.”

Smart meters measure energy consumption and send information on this and other factors such as power quality and outages back to the grid owner. This allows real-time monitoring of the energy distribution system and supports the development of smart grids, which are evolved grid systems that manage electricity demand in a sustainable, reliable and economic manner, built on advanced infrastructure and tuned to facilitate the integration of all involved. Smart grids are one factor in the consistent sustainable urban planning required to build smart cities.

Alongside intelligent technology, smart grids rely on incentive models and actively encouraging consumers to participate in the energy market, for example by reducing energy consumption when the price of electricity is high and shifting it to times when it is low and there is less environmental impact. There are also added customer benefits, for example, consumers in Memphis will benefit from instant-on pre-paid service transfer and service restoration after an outage.

 

NI Introduces Test Solution for 802.11ax High-Efficiency Wireless

National Instruments, the provider of platform-based systems that enable engineers and scientists to solve the world’s greatest engineering challenges, announced today an early access version of the WLAN Measurement Suite with support for the IEEE 802.11ax (draft 0.1) high-efficiency wireless draft standard. The WLAN Measurement Suite, combined with NI’s RF vector signal transceiver (VST), empowers engineers to measure the performance of their 802.11ax designs confidently in the presence of significant new changes to the 802.11 physical layer specification.

The WLAN Measurement Suite gives researchers, engineers and technologists the power and flexibility to generate and analyze a wide range of 802.11 waveforms, such as 802.11a/b/g/n/j/p/ac/ah/af. Now, with the measurement suite’s latest update targeting 802.11ax, these users can speed up development work on 802.11ax devices. The software supports key features of 802.11ax including narrower subcarrier spacing, 1024-QAM and multi-user orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). The updated measurement suite also includes LabVIEW system design software example code to help engineers automate WLAN measurements quickly and easily.

“The fast pace of evolving wireless standards demands instrumentation that can evolve at the speed of software,” said Charles Schroeder, vice president of RF marketing at NI. “Our support for the latest 802.11ax draft standard in the WLAN Measurement Suite is part of the evolution of a platform that scales with changing connectivity standards and provides our customers with superior RF performance in lab and production environments.”

NI’s platform-based approach helps ensure that engineers can update their existing PXI RF test systems to support 802.11ax device testing with a simple software update, and continue to do so as the 802.11ax standardization process evolves. Engineers can take advantage of this smarter approach to RF test to help lower their cost of test and better prepare for future connectivity and cellular standardization initiatives, such as 5G.

 

Moxa introduces Smart Remote Data Acquisition Devices with Wi-Fi

Moxa has announced a new data acquisition solution that brings greater versatility for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The new ioLogik™ 2542-WL1 and ioLogik 2512-WL1 both feature 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi connectivity, which will serve the growing number of devices and M2M applications that require wireless communication. The ioLogik 2542-WL1 supports analog I/O connections over Wi-Fi, whereas the ioLogik 2512-WL1 supports digital I/O connections over Wi-Fi.

With the addition of these two models, Moxa now offers a range of flexible data acquisition solutions for wired Ethernet, Wi-Fi, 2G GPRS, and 3G HSPA networks. “We want to make it as easy as possible for industrial users to collect and share sensor data in different environments and circumstances,” said Wenyuan Niu, Product Marketing Manager. “Wi-Fi is becoming a useful and popular mode of communication both on the factory floor and in remote locations. Our new wireless models will help users leverage Wi-Fi for their data acquisition requirements.”

Both ioLogik units feature automatic tag generation and reporting for connected sensors and devices. This function enables operators to monitor a large number of field devices with great efficiency, and also works in conjunction with Moxa’s MX-AOPC UA Server on the cloud to minimize network bandwidth and latency. Data communication is protected with the highest commercially available security (WPA2/802.11i), which features advanced encryption and authentication.

In addition to Wi-Fi, the ioLogik™ 2542-WL1 and 2512-WL1 both feature a 4-port unmanaged Ethernet switch and two serial ports for a seamless connection to a variety of field devices. The serial ports support data polling from devices using the Modbus RTU protocol. This data can be converted into Modbus TCP or AOPC tag format before sending it out over the Ethernet network. The units also support communication with multiple remote I/O devices under a single IP address. The slave Ethernet port can link up to 8 daisy-chained ioLogik E1200 expansion modules and convert more than 100 channels to one IP address. The other three Ethernet ports can connect to any Ethernet-driven field device.

ioLogik™ 2542-WL1 Features:

  • Supports Ethernet, serial,and WLAN communication interfaces
  • Click&Go Plus logic provides powerful front-end intelligence
  • 4-port unmanaged switch built in for linking to Ethernet devices
  • I/O expansion port for daisy chaining up to 8 ioLogik E1200 units
  • 2 serial ports (RS-232/422/485) for connecting field devices
  • Built-in datalogger supports an FTP server and microSD™ card with up to a 32 GB
  • Transforms Modbus RTU into Modbus TCP or Active Tags
  • Active communication with patented MX-AOPC UA Server
  • Smart alarm management: Email, SNMP traps, TCP, UDP
  • Wide operating temperature: -30 to 70°C (-22 to 158°F)

 

AnyBus Edge Gateways enable communication between IT-systems and the factory floor

The new Anybus .NET gateways enable real-time data from industrial machinery to be presented to .NET-based IT applications. This means that .NET programmers can get data directly from a PLC system on the other side of “the edge” to be used in applications for statistics, analysis or maintenance. The first .NET gateways are available for PROFIBUS and PROFINET.

A quick and easy way to realize IIoT:
The basic prerequisite for Industrial IoT is that industrial applications are able to communicate with IT systems. However, the operational technology (OT) on the factory floor uses fieldbus and industrial Ethernet networks, which are designed for real-time communication by default separated from the IT-infrastructure.

The Anybus .NET gateways address this situation by acting as translators which send and receive data between PROFIBUS- or PROFINET-networks and IT platforms using .NET as a framework.

The communication is set up in a couple of minutes and the .NET gateways are therefore a very fast way to realize IIoT.

The result is that IT systems get unprecedented access to real-time data from the factory floor which enables predictive maintenance, KPI-follow-up, machine analytics, data mining, big data processing, production statistics and much more – without interfering with the industrial processes.

The solution can be used for a wide range of use cases, from simple transfer of KPI values, advanced messages with structured data types, or ultra-fast transfer of I/O data for “big data.”

How it works:
In addition to connecting the data from the industrial processes to the IT-systems, the .NET gateways make the data understandable on the IT-side. The information exchange between the Operational Technology (OT) side and the Information Technology (IT) side is defined in a spreadsheet template which defines how the data is mapped, tagged and presented to IT-applications.

The spreadsheet is uploaded to the HMS code generator which automatically creates a customized high level C# API (events and Post methods) that is easy to integrate directly into a .NET application. It also generates a customized GSDML file for the PLC.

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New IIoT gateways from HMS allow industrial equipment to communicate with power grids

HMS Industrial Networks now introduces a new family of Industrial IoT gateways for Smart Grid applications. The Anybus SG-gateways enable communication between industrial applications and energy protocols.

This communication is the very basis for the so called “Smart Grid” where power plants and energy equipment are interacting with industrial applications. The SG-gateways are yet another example of how HMS realizes the Industrial Internet of Things.
Anybus SG-gateways make the Smart Grid possible
The new SG-gateways enable communication between industrial devices running Modbus, PROFIBUS, PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, or M-Bus and energy protocols (IEC61850 and IEC60870-5-104).

This means that a power plant control room which is using the IEC protocols, can connect to industrial devices such as generators, drives, filters and protection equipment.

Since the SG-gateways can act both as a master and slave, it is also possible to connect Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) which communicate over IEC-standards, to industrial networks, allowing them to be controlled by PLCs from e.g. Siemens, Rockwell or Mitsubishi.

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