Control Engineering

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Wireless, part 1
May 7, 2007

Last week's Economist had a special section on wireless technology. (The Economist does not make it easy to read their content online if you're not a subscriber.) As one might expect, it spent most of its time on consumer and telephone issues, but it did make a short but strategic discussion of industrial use in an oil refinery:

"A good place to get a glimpse of new wireless technologies in action is BP's Cherry Point Refinery in Blaine, Washington. Modernising the plant to keep it efficient is costly; BP says it has spent nearly $500m on this over the past ten years. New wireless technologies are critical, explains Tim Shooter, who works on future technology at BP.

"Until a few years ago wireless technology was not up to the job. The 'big leap forward', says Mr Shooter, is that the new technologies are far more reliable in hostile industrial conditions and the communications protocols are more intelligent.

"One notable innovation is 'ad-hoc mesh networking' in which each node on the network--eg, a sensor on a water pump--is both a transmitter and a receiver and can join the network whenever required....Each node can relay traffic to other devices, creating an interlocking web."

Cherry Point is Emerson's beta-test site, and was the proving ground cited at the introduction of their wireless instrumentation (using Dust Networks' TSMP technology) last year. There was another comment in the article worth mentioning:

"The average refinery has around 3,000 'instrumentation points' where data on things like temperature, flow, humidity and vibration are collected; managers would be even happier with 10,000 points if only they were less pricey." The potential of industrial wireless depends on the validity of this statement. Wireless instrumentation vendors are betting on the fact that plant operators want more information, if only they can figure out a way to get it economically. It will be interesting to see if end users find this idea all that compelling, or if they already have as much instrumentation as they care to use.

Posted by Peter Welander on May 7, 2007 | Comments (0)