Highway Addressable Remote Transducer Protocol Research Articles

Proactive and Predictive Maintenance Strategies and Application for Instrumentation & Control in Oil & Gas Industry

Instrumentation & Control Systems have gone through various revolutions in the oil and gas industry. The start of the industry was based on pneumatic controllers, operating with instrument air or instrument gas at 0.2 to 1.0 barg and the Instrument Protective System (IPS) was relay based. This system provided almost zero information or data that can be used to predict failure and had a higher unrevealed failure. The next phase of instrumentation was migration into the electronics era. This allowed for the migration from a pneumatic system to the application of electronics field device operation on 4-20mA connected to Distributed Control System (DCS) and IPS. Further development of 4-20mA communication protocol allowed for the development of digital superimpose communication called Highway Addressable Remote Transducer (HART). The data that is transmitted in HART protocol provides sufficient data and information to predict the health and functionality of the instrumentation. Changes in the maintenance philosophy from reactive maintenances to proactive or predictive maintenances, resulted in reduced downtime by scheduling maintenance to optimize the working window. This work process allows for greater productivity of assets, both human and capital. Dashboards are developed and utilised to alert fault detection and loss of redundancy, whereby data is relayed from DCS and IPS to a web-based system. Available tools being developed in the industry and application of IoT within the industry allows for real-time field device health monitoring and an engine to predict deviations. The strength and weakness of the various proactive or predictive maintenance strategies are compared and summarized, including scope for future research and application in the industry.

MAC Layer Protocols for Internet of Things: A Survey

Due to the wide variety of uses and the diversity of features required to meet an application, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are moving forward at a strong pace to meet this demand while at the same time trying to meet the time-to-market of these applications. The characteristics required by applications, such as coverage area, scalability, transmission data rate, and applicability, refer to the Physical and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer designs of protocols. This paper presents a deep study of medium access control (MAC) layer protocols that are used in IoT with a detailed description of such protocols grouped (by short and long distance coverage). For short range coverage protocols, the following are considered: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Near Field Communication (NFC), Bluetooth IEEE 802.15.1, Bluetooth Low Energy, IEEE 802.15.4, Wireless Highway Addressable Remote Transducer Protocol (Wireless-HART), Z-Wave, Weightless, and IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ah. For the long range group, Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT), Long Term Evolution (LTE) CAT-0, LTE CAT-M, LTE CAT-N, Long Range Protocol (LoRa), and SigFox protocols are studied. A comparative study is performed for each group of protocols in order to provide insights and a reference study for IoT applications, considering their characteristics, limitations, and behavior. Open research issues on the topic are also identified.

HART PROTOCOL ANALYSER BASED IN LABVIEW

Analysis of Highway Addressable Remote Transducer (HART) protocol is important in reliability evaluation of HART based systems. The present work proposes a virtual instrument based solution for HART signal analysis that includes a digital oscilloscope with GPIB interface, a HART modem, a PC with a GPIB interface board and a RS232 port, and a software component developed in LabVIEW. The HART analyser permits the visualisation of signals that correspond to the HART protocol, gives access to data coming from field instruments and has the ability to analyse and modify field instrument performance.