Phoenix — Honeywell has adapted its expertise in wireless building security and home alarm systems to the industrial space with the debut of its OneWireless mesh network, announced this week here at the company's annual Process Solutions user group meeting. The wireless mesh network aims to not only improve plant safety, reliability, and efficiency, but also save manufacturers money, officials said during a press conference.
The OneWireless infrastructure, which works with multiple industrial protocols and applications simultaneously, was announced in tandem with its first industrial application, the Honeywell Instant Location System, a real-time tracking system for both people and industrial assets. Both the location system and OneWireless integrate with a variety of wireless location technologies, including GPS, WiFi, and active RFID.
Honeywell's approach to wireless is to create a standards-based platform that can stretch across acres, if need be. The OneWireless infrastructure is scalable to 30,000 devices using existing Honeywell XYR 5000 transmitters or the newer XYR 6000 line, which includes corrosion, gauge pressure, differential pressure, high-level analog input, and temperature transmitters.
"Our intent is to use a broader bandwidth so everything works on the same network," said Jack Bolick, Honeywell Process Solutions president, in an interview with Managing Automation. The value-add that Honeywell delivers is a network management layer for all types of deployments, he said. "There, we have a lot of IP, but if it is something to do with the basic network, it's not proprietary."
To be useful, however, the mesh hardware needs software that supports business applications. The first offerings from Honeywell will not be mission-critical in nature, officials said. Instead, they will focus on issues such as energy management, regulatory compliance (such as monitoring the use of a safety shower), and asset tracking. But wireless eventually will make its way into the process control loop, Bolick said. Honeywell does not believe that customers are ready for mission-critical applications yet. "We have to wait until they are confident in the technology we roll out," he said.
The wireless technology, which is enabled through Honeywell's partnership with 3eTI Technologies International, is a sensor-based mesh network that helps ensure reliability through its self-healing abilities. If one node fails, the network automatically reconfigures itself and finds a new transmission path by hopping to another sensor in the network.
Bolick sees wireless as a natural evolution of Honeywell's Experion PKS (Process Knowledge System). Experion includes modules for process control, connectivity, and asset management. "Wireless wraps around that," he said. "It is an enabler and, in some ways, a game changer, because it brings the cost per node down."
Wireless connectivity can save thousands of dollars over wired alternatives. Additional cost savings can come from avoiding the downtime associated with regular maintenance. During a general session here, company officials cited an example of a chemical plant that had to shut down to get a manual check on pipe corrosion. By wirelessly monitoring the pipes, the company saved $500,000 annually and better ensured employee safety.
At refinery ALON USA, which began its wireless deployment with point-to-point wireless sensors — not the OneWireless mesh — initial cost savings were approximately $10,000 compared with a wired solution, officials told Managing Automation. ALON officials also touted the ease of deployment. "It took four hours to install four transmitters," said Byron Lewis, process control specialist at ALON. The most complex part was getting data into the Honeywell TDC 3000 distributed control system, he noted, but even that wasn't particularly difficult. "It just needed a Modbus connection," he said.
Since process plants — be they refineries or chemicals factories — can be dangerous environments, the goal of the new Honeywell Instant Location System (HILS) application is to track people in the event of an emergency to ensure that they are safe at a mustering station. An individual wears a badge that transmits data to the OneWireless network at intervals of a few seconds. Within seconds of a plant incident, HILS can track employees and visitors, allowing operators to generate real-time mustering reports to help emergency responders quickly obtain accurate head counts and locate missing or injured employees, Honeywell said.
OneWireless starter kits, due to become available next month, will include two transmitters and a wireless gateway. Honeywell has 200 to 300 kits ready for delivery, at a price of $7,500 each.
In related news at the user group meeting, Honeywell unveiled a multi-node radio that supports mesh, WiFi, and field I/O over a frequency-hopping spread spectrum. The company also demonstrated a prototype of a radio that operates on the 802.15.4 standard. The radios connect with transmitters that can support multiple protocols, including, OPC and HART.