SMAR Innovates in Profibus

New technologies appear every now and then, but only a few provide innovation that often can offer a great variety of industrial solutions never imagined before. Always innovating and frequently surprising the automation marketing, SMAR recently launched both Profibus DP and PA protocols in a single controller.

SMAR presented to the market the DF97 controller. Its innovative feature is: the same card includes a double 10/100Mbps Ethernet communication port, one Profibus DP port up to 12Mbits/s. and four Profibus PA ports. This equipment supports a total of 126 slaves that can be divided between the Profibus DP and PA networks, with each PA channel supporting up to 32 slaves. In this architecture, the gateway for the DP/PA conversion is mounted internally with the CPU logic processor. This composition enabled better internal panel compactation, less hardware usage and smaller composition of manufacturers on the presentation of the Profibus solution. Another advantage is that the Ethernet communication reaches the point where the PA communication begins, i.e., in a particular architecture the fiber optic is taken to the DP/PA gateway site that is mounted with the processor hardware.

DF97 – Master DPV1 Profibus scheme with 4 PROFIBUS-PA and 1 PROFIBUS-DP channels.

Recently this controller went into operation on a sugar cane-based sugar, ethanol and energy plant whose automated sector includes the reception of sugar cane straw to increase the production of steam in the bio-mass boilers. With it, a great part of the material that was previously burned on the field is now incinerated in the boiler, generating steam and consequently improving the generation of electricity for the co-generation. This controller characteristics were important for the straw recuperation process, since it involved applying new optimization solutions and constant project adaptations, according to the needs observed during the startup and also during the pre-operation stage.