Fault-tolerant fieldbus system

MooreHawke has announced the availability of the Trunksafe brochure, which contains technical details on the world's only redundant fieldbus system.

Previously, to obtain a fault-tolerant, redundant Foundation Fieldbus system, users had to duplicate everything in the segment, including H1 cards, power supplies, device couplers and all the field devices, such as transmitters and valves. Achieving redundancy was extremely expensive and relied on special software (1oo2, 2oo3 voting schemes, etc) within the DCS.

If a critical process unit goes down because of a failed fieldbus segment, the cost can be enormous - some estimates have been as high as $500,000/h when a refinery is down. The fieldbus world has needed a fault-tolerant system for years, but few redundant systems have ever been installed in the process control industry because of high costs and systems configuration difficulties.

The Trunksafe brochure explains how it is not necessary to duplicate the entire segment to achieve redundancy.

Most importantly, it is not necessary to duplicate the field instruments nor to have any special software at the DCS, which can possibly save users tens of thousands of dollars per fieldbus segment.

The Trunksafe brochure can be downloaded in PDF format from www.miinet.com/products/sg_fieldbus.shtml.