Ethernet takes control of the factory floor

Shell Deer Park Refining announced in February that it would spend $12 million upgrading the automation systems at its petroleum refinery outside Houston. By fall, the refinery - which can process 340,000 barrels of crude oil per day - will boast new, cutting-edge instrumentation and controls that take advantage of high-speed industrial Ethernet.

The Deer Park project is one of several industrial Ethernet deployments launched by Shell Oil and its joint ventures. For example, Shell Oil is building a massive chemical plant in the jungle of Nanhai, China, featuring the latest automation technologies including industrial Ethernet.

Industrial Ethernet refers to the use of standard Ethernet chips, components and wiring on manufacturing networks to replace older, special-purpose protocols. By deploying the technology, Shell Oil is dramatically reducing the cost of network hardware used in its plants. At the same time, Shell benefits from faster performance, simpler networks and improved information sharing between manufacturing and back-office systems.

Shell Oil isn't alone. A growing number of manufacturers including General Motors, Great Dane Trailers, Western Kentucky Energy and Syncrude Canada are deploying industrial Ethernet to control their machinery.

"There's a tremendous amount of activity going on in industrial Ethernet," says Chantal Polsonetti, a vice president with ARC Advisory Group, a market research firm that specializes in manufacturing automation. The standards bodies that specialize in manufacturing networks have released their own industrialized versions of Ethernet that integrate with the older, proprietary protocols while meeting the stringent safety and security requirements of manufacturing environments.

At the information layer, industrial Ethernet allows companies to pull data off a manufacturing line and feed it to enterprise software such as asset management and inventory control applications. This real-time data is made available via a Web browser to anyone in the company for remote monitoring and diagnostic purposes.

The next step is for industrial Ethernet to carry real-time communications between controllers of the sensors, push buttons, motor starters and other devices on manufacturing lines. Instead of installing three different network cards on each device to support separate information, control and device networks, a manufacturer can install a single industrial Ethernet card, thereby cutting the cost and complexity of its plant network.

Polsonetti says most industrial automation suppliers are shipping controllers with Ethernet capabilities, whether or not that capability is used. She projects that 4.7 million Ethernet-enabled controllers will be shipped in 2005, up from 116,000 in 2000.

"As long as you adhere to the mantra of intelligent implementation, it makes a lot of sense to go with industrial Ethernet for control," Polsonetti says.

That's what Basic Machinery, a Siler City, N.C., maker of manufacturing equipment for the brick industry, learned when it began designing a new $1.7 million machine for sorting and stacking bricks. The company's new dehacker, which was delivered to its first customer last month, uses Ethernet for its information and control systems.

"Ethernet gives us the speed we need, which is 100 megabits per second," says Joey Boswell, project manager for control engineering at Basic Machinery.

Boswell says alternative protocols are either much slower than industrial Ethernet or require more expensive components and wiring. Basic Machinery is using standard, off-the-shelf, twisted-pair Ethernet cables in its dehacker, which weighs 32 tons and is as large as half a football field.

"Where Ethernet really shines is that every one of my [input/output] devices is Web-enabled, which gives me diagnostics right at the machine's nerve system," Boswell says. "That's something that all these other proprietary bus networks cannot give you."

Users can enter an IP address for any of the machine's 700 I/O systems into a Web browser to access reams of real-time diagnostic information about that device. Boswell says this feature helped sell the dehacker to Pine Hall Brick, of Winston-Salem, N.C. "This is the first use of an Ethernet control system in the brick industry," Boswell says.

One potential stumbling block for industrial Ethernet deployments in control systems is fear of security breaches. The older three-tiered manufacturing networks - with separate information, control and device-level communications - offer security advantages by keeping the different types of network traffic physically separated from one another.

Flattening these networks into a single industrial Ethernet backbone - while cutting costs dramatically - has some inherent security risks, experts say.

Security concerns are one reason that Syncrude is not yet deploying industrial Ethernet to control the sensors in its oil mining facility in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Instead, Syncrude uses industrial Ethernet to pull historical data off the control systems for use in its laboratory and simulator. Syncrude mines 500,000 tons of sand per day to extract oil for refining.

"We've been using the industrial Ethernet network for about four or five years," says Ian Verhappen, an engineering associate with Syncrude. "We were one of the first adopters of the technology."

Syncrude's 100M bit/sec industrial Ethernet backbone connects several control systems to each other, but it isn't used to control the machinery. Syncrude has firewalls set up between the control system and the industrial Ethernet backbone, and between the industrial Ethernet backbone and the corporate office automation network.

Still, Verhappen says Syncrude eventually will use its industrial Ethernet backbone for more applications, if not direct control of machinery. For example, Syncrude is rolling out real-time video of key manufacturing processes on the industrial Ethernet backbone.

The biggest challenge Basic Machinery and other manufacturers face with industrial Ethernet deployments is finding automation engineers familiar with Ethernet, which traditionally has been an office technology.

Most deployments of industrial Ethernet are retrofitting existing machinery vs. the outfitting of so-called greenfield, or new, plants. But that trend may shift as the manufacturing sector pulls itself out of an 18-month slump.

"There are not a lot of greenfield activities going on right now," says Doug McEldowney, strategic marketing manager for Rockwell Automation Control and Information Group, which sells Ethernet-enabled information and control systems. "But that's where we believe the boom for industrial Ethernet is going to be."

MANUFACTURING: AT A GLANCE • The manufacturing industry contributed $1.5 trillion to the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. • From 1992 through 1997, GDP in manufacturing grew by 5.2% annually, compared with 3.1% for the economy overall, according to the National Association of Manufacturers. • Gartner’s 2001 Spending Survey shows that the average IT budget as a percentage of revenue is 2.76 for discrete manufacturing in 2002. The percentage for process manufacturing is 1.61.