Banner Engineering Corp., a provider of sensor, measurement, and machine safety systems, made its first official foray into the wireless world with the announcement of the SureCross Wireless Network.
The wireless system, which consists of a gateway system controller and remotely located nodes, gives manufacturers a way to pull information from traditionally hard-to-reach places, such as rotating machinery. Banner officials said SureCross will allow the company to move beyond its roots in discrete markets and into process-based industries through new applications, such as tank-level detection and temperature monitoring.
SureCross, which is built entirely on Banner Engineering technology, has been in development for five years. Full installation beta testing has been under way for the past 18 months at some of the company's largest client sites, including an automotive manufacturer in Detroit and a number of steel mills, the company said.
Although industrial-strength wireless architectures are available today from Emerson, Honeywell, and Invensys, the Banner system leverages key proprietary technology, including advanced power management and bidirectional communication that ensures data integrity. The bidirectional radio technology verifies data transmission at both the gateway and the node, the company said. When a node sends a data packet to the gateway, the gateway should send a response signal; if it does not, the node will go into a predefined default condition. For example, if a sensor monitoring a pump does not receive new data within a specified time frame — which could be milliseconds or minutes — the gateway will turn off the pump since it cannot verify the water levels.
"Defining default conditions in the event of an RF communication failure is unique to the SureCross system," said Kaitlin Carter, marketing analyst at Banner Engineering, in an interview with Managing Automation.
Another unique technology is SureCross' FlexPower module, which feeds power to the node from a 10V to 30V DC line power source, or, if available, from solar or battery modules.
SureCross is built for 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz radio frequencies, but is also interoperable with any HMI or PLC that uses serial communications. "Be it Modbus or Ethernet/IP, we can drop our network into that backbone and still see data right away," Carter said.
The main customization comes at the application level. Applications that could benefit from SureCross range from rotating-equipment data acquisition, temperature monitoring, and remote monitoring of tower or tank farms, to detection of water tank levels, physical plant energy monitoring, and loading dock occupancy monitoring. Banner officials said the company works directly with each customer to determine its requirements and then configures the software before shipping it to the customer.
The SureCross DX80 FlexPower Nodes and gateways are available immediately, priced at $1,438 for a gateway and a single node, with additional nodes starting at $450 each. Each gateway can support up to 15 nodes and 12 I/O points. Extra engineering charges may apply if a customer needs specialized applications, the company said.
The real value of SureCross is its reliability and Banner's ability to control every aspect of the system, company officials said. "Because we are not working with other vendors ... we have the ability to customize every aspect of the product," Carter said, which can alleviate problems, such as RF interference, that can make a big difference when it comes to data integrity.