I’m in Houston and headed for the ISA Week sessions tomorrow. I’ll be on a panel discussing functional safety, so look for a post on that later this week. In the meantime, James Powell was presenting at Emerson Exchange last week and provided this report:
The end of the bus wars have led to some interesting events. One of them was last week, where I presented at the Emerson Global Users Exchange, alongside Russ Muller of Emerson, and Rajiv Shah of Jacobs Technology. Our presentation was called “Great Protocols Think Alike – PROFIBUS and Foundation Fieldbus team up on a fascinating application.” The application is a wind tunnel that Jacobs did which was extremely interesting. The fact that not only can Profibus and Foundation Fieldbus play well together so can Emerson and Siemens; I also thought was pretty interesting. Control engineering posted a short video about this:
Profibus was chosen to take advantage of the reduced wiring and great diagnostics. FF was chosen for the instrument because Rosemount had an instrument that could do a very difficult differential pressure measurement. At the end of the session, Siemens provided complementary copies of Catching the Process Fieldbus – An introduction to PROFIBUS for process automation by James Powell and Henry Vandelinde.
The Exchange had a number of different presentations talking about PROFIBUS. There was a great introduction to PROFIBUS given by Emerson. There was also one talking about how AMS now supports PROFIBUS DP. In the technology fair part, there were a number of new instruments supporting PROFIBUS PA.