Emerson is First of Many to Begin Shipping Open Standard WirelessHART™ Automation Products

Published: 25th September 2009 | Issue 8 Share article:

Company’s standard-enabled Smart Wireless offering will help customers easily adopt wireless and realise benefits in plant-wide use

Acknowledging the importance of broad multi-vendor availability, Emerson Process Management has announced that it is the first of many suppliers to begin shipping open interoperable WirelessHARTTM standard products. Just as its wireless technology has opened a new era for industrial process automation, standardisation will support broad adoption.

"We are thrilled that our Smart Wireless products are first to ship with the new WirelessHART standard built in," said John Berra, president of Emerson Process Management. "We’re also excited that customers will have a growing range of WirelessHART applications from the industry-wide member companies of the HART® Communication Foundation that approved the standard in September 2007."

"Our customers face increasing challenges of complex production, tougher feedstock, and environmental and safety requirements," continued Berra. "They are urgently seeking more information to increase plant and asset utilisation and performance. Our standard inter-operable Smart Wireless field networks can deliver the information for step-change improvements while being easy and low cost to deploy."

Emerson has begun shipping WirelessHART products from its Smart Wireless range of pressure, flow, level, temperature, vibration, pH, and discrete transmitters and gateways, AMS® Suite predictive maintenance and Wireless SNAP-ON software, 375 Field Communicator, and native wireless interface of DeltaVTM and Ovation® digital systems. The continuous stream of future new products from Emerson will also use the standard, including the soon-to-be-released valve position transmitter, and Smart Wireless THUMTM Adapter that will unleash stranded diagnostics in legacy devices.

In keeping with the mandates of the HART Communication Foundation and WirelessHART, Emerson’s Smart Wireless brings broad innovation without taking away or changing existing HART functionality. This ensures backward compatibility, preserving the investment users have in tools, training and knowledge.

According to Berra, HART 7 wired and wireless technologies will coexist in plants. Wired solutions will continue to dominate safety and critical control applications. Early applications of WirelessHART include easy and quick upgrades of existing facilities to monitor variables previously out of reach economically or physically. The wireless applications are expanding to include non-critical closed loop control or open loop control with humans in the loop.

"On the strength of the high reliability and performance of self-organising WirelessHART mesh technology and the major economic advantages of wireless, we believe WirelessHART technology will account for more than 20 percent of the signals in new plants within five years," said Berra.

www.EmersonProcess.co.uk/firstHART


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