Chinese wind farm gains network redundancy

Dongfang Steam Turbine Works (DSTW), a Chinese manufacturer of steam turbines, was working on a wind farm project involving 66 1.5 MW wind turbines in Heilongjiang, China. DSTW needed to establish a SCADA system to help the staff remotely monitor on-site equipment and operations while recording data about ongoing operations for real-time analysis.

Due to the harsh weather conditions in north-east China, the networking devices had to be extremely rugged to operate reliably. DSTW found that Moxa’s IKS-6726 rackmount managed industrial ethernet switches and EDS-408A industrial ethernet switches were a perfect fit for their specific network infrastructure requirements.

The system requirements for the project were that the equipment must be able to support a wide operating temperature range, must provide network redundancy with a fast recovery capability for system reliability, must provide at least three fibre-optic ports for uplink and long-distance outbound transmissions, and provide network management software for system monitoring.

Moxa provided a solution involving the installation of an EDS-208A-M-SC industrial ethernet switch at the top of each wind turbine to connect to the equipment inside the turbine. This switch is networked to an EDS-408A-2S1M-ST-T switch at the bottom of the turbine via a fibre-optic port.

The EDS-408A-2S1M-ST-T switch comes with three fibre-optic ports; one fibre port is the uplink connection to the EDS-208A-M-SC at the top of the turbine and the other two connect to adjacent wind turbines to form a ring topology.

Due to the extremely high security and availability requirements, DSTW deployed a ring topology in the wind farm network to provide fast redundancy in case of network failure. Both the EDS-408A-2S1M-ST-T and the IKS-6726 support redundant Turbo Ring topology with a recovery time less than 20 ms.

The control centre employs Moxa’s IKS-6726 rackmount managed industrial ethernet switches to connect field switches with the SCADA system and network management servers. Moxa’s MXview network management software was also installed to help operators monitor network status by automatically discovering the network topology and displaying real-time alarm information.