Phoenix Contact Exhibitor Demo: Enabling the Digital Transformation

Learn more about our networking and automation portfolio as a complement to Ignition. We will showcase our PLCnext technology with Modular I/O, Ethernet switches, and new MQTT / MODBUS protocol converter products. We will introduce you to new upcoming technologies based on Single Pair Ethernet and APL. 

Transcript:

00:00
Arnold Offner: Hi there. My name is Arnold Offner, and this will be my very first presentation to you Ignition system integrators, end users, and partners. It's just recently that Phoenix Contact became a member of the Inductive Alliance Partner Program, and so my presentation today will not include a true demonstration of product as such, but I wanted to talk to you about some of the examples of some of the work we've already been doing with the Ignition software package. I wanted to thank you all for coming to this presentation. At least I was not holding you up from lunch, and I'm glad you took the time after lunch to be here this afternoon. At Phoenix Contact we're actually a German-headquartered company, but there are a lot of similarities between ourselves and Inductive Automation. If you look at the idea that they're family-owned, privately held, and they essentially have grown organically just like we have. Here in the US, we're about 1000 people. You probably know us for terminal blocks, those green terminal blocks that you find on a lot of electronics out there. You probably know us for power supplies and relays, but our real connection with Inductive Automation and the Ignition software package is related to the hardware that I would call networking and automation.

01:19
Arnold Offner: And so in my presentation today, I wanted to show you some of those examples, but more importantly, I wanted to give you an outlook into where our partnership is gonna go and how that might benefit applications of yours in the future because I've heard people talk about the IIoT, I've heard people talk about applications that might involve the edge, and what I wanted to share with you today is some of the work that I'm doing at Phoenix Contact that involves, I think, a technology that will be very interesting for you towards the end of my presentation. And then Marcus will run around with the microphone towards the end, and he'll get to see if there's any other questions you have at the end of my presentation. So we're good to start. You signed up for 30 minutes, so I'm gonna try and respect your time and make sure that this works for both of us. So at Phoenix Contact we talk about enabling the Digital Transformation. This actually is a campus picture of our headquarters in Germany, but we actually, shall we say, essentially, except for my accent, which you'll note didn't come from the US, came from way south of here.

02:21
Arnold Offner: We actually have a campus; this is our main campus in Blomberg, Germany. It essentially services our global operations but what it also does at the same time it allows us here in the US to actually, what we would say, think global but act local. In other words, a lot of my colleagues that you'll ever get to be meeting here in the US market or whichever market you're in, you will find that they are essentially local people who understand the local markets. I'm involved in development and manufacturing, and like I say, it's about this idea of the Digital Transformation; it's about automation; it's about networking. So now I'm gonna make sure that the clicker works. And it doesn't. Okay. I'll tell you what we'll do.

03:05
Arnold Offner: We'll do it the other way. Alright. So this, just to give you an idea, is the web interface that we've set up at Phoenix Contact, and if you come to our small booth outside in the hallway, you'll get to see two things that we're actually demonstrating. We've used the Ignition software package to show essentially our customers, yourselves, but to allow our salespeople just to tell a customer, "Hey, if you type in iiot.phoenixcontact.com, we will actually give you a sampling of some of the things we're working on right now." On this lower purple line, you'll notice that actually is our current, and this is just a screenshot, so it's not live; it actually is our solar installation that we have at our facility in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And then we also have about 18 electric vehicle employee charging stations.

04:00
Arnold Offner: And so we actually just run a very little interesting number each day. We basically think that about four miles is possible with one kilowatt of electric energy in an electric vehicle. And so that's where we come up with 550 miles of... miles that we've charged employees that have an electric vehicle in the employee fleet in Harrisburg. We have about 800 people in our facility in Harrisburg, so product marketing, sales coordination, design and manufacturing, and logistics. And then scattered around the country another 250 salespeople who are responsible for either customers or particular industries around the contiguous US. So one of the exciting reference projects that I did wanna mention, and you'll find more of this on YouTube if you go looking for it, involves a project we did last year, and actually last year and the year before, but it was successfully deployed during the course of early last year. It's with a hydro plant up close to Boise, Idaho, known as the Lucky Peak Hydro Power Plant. Derek Stone is one of the gentlemen who is actually very closely involved with this project together with our team, and we actually have two Gold Certified Ignition Software Engineers at our facility in Pennsylvania, which means they actually wrote a lot of the code that then helped the folks at Lucky Peak actually deploy Ignition together with our hardware in the upgrade that they were deploying in their facility near Boise, Idaho.

05:29
Arnold Offner: What I will tell you is there's two videos, and then there's also a set of articles that were written that actually discuss how the Phoenix Contact hardware together with the Inductive Automation software came to be, how this upgrade took place. So as part of my agenda for today, like I said, I really wanted to just talk to you about the things that we're displaying here to add to products you might already know from us, and I'm gonna save that one right at the end there for last. Like I said, Phoenix Contact back in 2017 launched a controller we know as PLCnext. It is a very interesting PLC because it's not your custom PLC. It's based and predicated around a Linux controller. In other words, it's based entirely on the Yocto platform. And what it allows customers to do is we develop software that allows you to use the typical IEC 61131 software programs, but it also allows you to write your own code. And so if you're best in class or you have a certain skill set, either as a programmer or as a company, it's also possible for you then to develop software code that you could then sell through a PLCnext store that we've created to go with it. I'm gonna cover a little bit of the Ethernet switch technology and then talk about protocol converters, but really my key discussion for today is to tell you about how we're very soon gonna be able to get into this space as well.

06:53
Arnold Offner: And that technology is gonna be based on what I wanted to share with you in a moment called Ethernet APL and SPE. And so that is Ethernet APL is predicated around its usage in the process industry, the heavy process industry, and SPE; if you've not heard about it so far, it actually is called... It's single-pair Ethernet. And single-pair Ethernet is gonna allow you to go 1000 meters, so 3280 feet. It's gonna allow you to essentially take 10 megabits of data all the way to devices. And some of the technology that I'll show you in a moment actually just stands to benefit from this capability. And then towards the end, I might still have a chance to then tell you some of the raffle prize winners of people who may have stopped by our booth already and some of the raffle prizes we have to give away. So the area of application where we get involved could be considered to be these five. Phoenix Contact is very well known in the factory automation space. So what we would consider production logistics, everything there, machinery, network machinery. If you then take a look further up to the side here, you'll see infrastructure. So we've done a lot of projects with customers that involve ports, harbors, pipelines.

08:07
Arnold Offner: We've been very much involved in the area of power plants, so the IEC 61850. And when I talk about networking, also realize that part of our portfolio also includes cybersecurity. So we also have capabilities to allow people to log in remotely to equipment, plant, machinery, and basically extract data without having to physically send a person there. And this is very important too if you consider that Germany as such is an export-led country, so a lot of technology that our customers buy from us in Germany that gets exported to other countries. It's a very expensive proposition to send a technician out to find out that the power cord was unplugged, and that's the reason why the machine's not working. It'd be good to know that ahead of time, and then also know what parts you need to take with you if you get called away to a site somewhere else across the globe. Phoenix Contact is probably best known for its products that were originally defined in, when electricity became a big thing in the '20s and '30s. And so our terminal blocks actually go back that far, in other words, to the time when electricity and electric trams, and this is even before the motor car became an essential, I think, part of everyone's life globally.

09:20
Arnold Offner: Then of course we're talking machines and systems, so whether it's logistics, whether it's going to be containerized packages, and the part that is not quite clearly shown here that I'd refer to in area number four is we also do a lot of work in the water, wastewater. And slowly but surely we're also starting to invest more and more effort right now into the oil and gas, the chemical industry, and that's the team that I'm involved with here in the US. So we've actually been set up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as a center of competence for the process industry, and that is why a lot of the process-related products that I'm about to talk to you about today come from the work that the team, the development team, and the manufacturing team we have in Harrisburg is involved with. So with that, I wanted to first show you a product portfolio that we started in about the 2016-2017 timeframe. This is also a pointer, right? So I wanted to let you know we've developed an IO-Link Master, in other words, a device that allows us to connect independently using an Ethernet port to an IO-Link infrastructure. There is somebody already who's come to talk to us about a module we created, which was a serial gateway, but actually not a serial gateway; it's an Ethernet-based gateway which allows us to extract HART data from a HART installation.

10:41
Arnold Offner: So customers are revisiting their HART devices in the field, and those critically important ones we can actually extract that data off the side without compromising the performance of the plant. And then over to the very left is a set of four different families of products that we have, and I'm just gonna basically not belabor all the different types of protocols. Save to tell you that this is where we take a serial communication and we convert it to Ethernet, and the moment we can convert it to Ethernet, there's a lot of creativity that all of you could come up with to then deploy this into an Ignition-based package or a solution for your customers. The one important one that's exciting for us this week is we are doing a little bit of a soft launch this week about an MQTT protocol converter that we've created, which essentially is available in a form factor of one of those four. Two of those are actually raffle prizes, and essentially what we're doing is we are taking Modbus TCP or RTU and then either through a single port or through a dual port, which allows you to daisy chain things. You can then essentially take Modbus data and then convert that to MQTT along an Ethernet infrastructure. So those are the part numbers, and I know sometimes always people grab a cell phone and want to see part numbers, but that just to give you an idea of the Ethernet port count and the part numbers.

12:10
Arnold Offner: And the ones I marked in bold are actually the two protocol converters we've actually set up as raffle prizes for today. Alright, so the most important thing that I did want to talk to you about revolves around this topic of the field level today. The slide, as you'll notice bottom left, refers to something called Akima. Akima is the world's largest process control and process automation trade show anywhere in the world. It's held every three years. And back in 2021 is when we first, during the lockdown, actually conducted a virtual event where we talked about the space in the process automation space that is still not Ethernet compliant. And this is where a currently serial bus or analog connectivity currently exists. You're all aware of 4-20 milliamp loops. You're probably all aware of things like HART. You're probably also aware of things like PROFIBUS PA or Foundation Fieldbus. And this little area has never really been, until now, an area, a domain that you could actually do with Ethernet. And roll on into a time now that I'll refer to you as well, is we now have a technology known as Ethernet APL.

13:20
Arnold Offner: So it is a derivative of the IEEE single-pair Ethernet specification. And what we've actually gone and done is we have created an intrinsically safe connection, which allows us to go 200 meters from a switch in two wire down to a field device. And what we're able to do now is essentially tell you that Ethernet is now possible all the way to the very edge in a process automation application, probably the most difficult ones to engineer. And using this technique, this is the very same technique we do with single-pair Ethernet. So everybody who's ever worked with 4-20 or with HART or with any of the field bus systems know it's always two wires. It's not four pairs. So what we've actually gone and done is we've taken the IEEE 802.3cg standard, which essentially allows 10 megabits a second over a distance of 1000 meters. So make that 1000 meters. I always have to be careful how I get this right, but 3280 feet. And what that would allow you to then do is essentially have a smart device in the field that now has an IP address, which essentially can become part of an Ethernet network. So single-pair Ethernet is something that you're gonna hear more and more about. And I think at Phoenix Contact, because we've developed both things in the SPE space or the APL space, APL is nothing more than an advanced physical layer for process applications. So you can put whatever Ethernet protocol on top of that that you want.

14:49
Arnold Offner: We're essentially now going to be able to tell you that going to the edge means going all the way to the field instrument. What this also means, of course, is that this technology is still gonna live side by side with 4-20 and HART. It's still gonna live side by side with Fieldbus techniques, but it is gonna allow you now to get very advanced instrumentation or actuating devices to be part of your infrastructure at far higher speeds. And 10 megabits a second, just so you know what we're talking about, 10 megabits per second means we are 10,000 times faster than HART. And it also means that we are 300 times faster than any Fieldbus system out there. So sometimes when I do this presentation for my colleagues, I say, "This is an industry that no longer is gonna have time for coffee breaks." So the APL project is based around work that was done by four very notable standards development organizations. You'll probably recognize those four logos across the top. The FieldCom group is responsible, of course, for foundation, Fieldbus, and the HART protocol. The ODVA, as you know, is responsible for Ethernet IP. We're a member there. We're also a member of the OPC UA because what you now have to realize, if you start talking things in a digital space, OPC UA is probably gonna become the future platform on how this data transfer occurs.

16:04
Arnold Offner: And then, of course, the PROFIBUS, PROFINET organization, which also has its strength and is pretty much the rest of the world. But there are applications here too in the US that we're aware of. So those four standards organizations got together, together with 12 well-known companies in the space. And essentially what we did was we created a standard, a physical layer, which is protocol agnostic. And then what happened is at the end of August of 2022, the project, as it started in 2018, four years later, was dissolved. And then these standards development organizations went back to their particular members to then develop this technology further so that each of them can now create an Ethernet-based protocol on top of this advanced physical layer. So some of these companies you will recognize too, either because they are producing DCS systems or because they are producing sensors and actuators, commonly already used in the process space, or companies like Phoenix Contact, who we consider... Who I would consider to be in the infrastructure space. In other words, we are using a Layer 2 managed switch technology to actually create an IT-to-OT combination, which allows us to use regular Ethernet on the north side and then use the OT capabilities of APL into the field.

17:23
Arnold Offner: You will see that this is also a group of competitors that collaborate very well, just like I would say Alliance partners do within ICC each week, or each year when we meet for this week. And then the other thing I wanted to share with you is just some of the standards that we've also created and some of the documentation we've created, which allows us to essentially also basically create the foundation for now other companies to get involved in the technology too. And so I think I'm speaking to a lot of people who are gonna deploy the technology, and so the one thing I would mention is there is also an APL engineering guideline, which would probably become very interesting for you in the future. It's about 100 pages long, but it essentially takes the technology and the technique we've used from 4-20 and HART, and essentially now using APL allows us now to actually allow people to actually start defining, to start specifying an APL infrastructure moving forward. We are also currently, this is the part we're wrapping up right now, we're currently in the process of doing APL conformance testing, so interoperability, but all of these manufacturers are currently in the stages of either getting final certification or on the stages of still making sure that they have their class 1, div 2 standards, that they can conform to IECX or ATEX or any kind of national standards.

18:42
Arnold Offner: There are some countries that still insist on doing things a little differently. I'm thinking of countries like the UK. I'm thinking of countries like China, Korea, Japan. Those standards for those particular markets are still basically the steps that these manufacturers, including us, still have to work on. But the technology is now here, and what I wanted to share with you is that the technology is gonna allow us to actually develop some very, very interesting new concepts moving forward. And so in this Digital Transformation, we finally now have Ethernet all the way to field devices. I just wanted to give you a picture that shows the collaboration that occurred at the Phoenix Contact booth in June of this year in Germany. So together with the companies ABB, together with Endress and Hauser, together with KROHNE, and then a valve controller company here called Samson, we actually physically showed how this is possible. And I always like to point out that if you look at this ring, you're looking at a layer 2 managed ring, all right, with redundancy integrated. It can either be done with copper, or we've also got two SFP ports, which allow us to do it over fiber. And then we're using our PLCnext actually as an edge gateway. So in other words, it's not actually in part of the process. We're using the graphics here of any DCS manufacturer.

19:56
Arnold Offner: Our success so far has been with ABB and Honeywell. We're currently working with companies like Yokogawa and with Siemens on Next. And essentially our PLCnext is really doing what we call the NOA, the NAMUR Open Architecture. So it actually is extracting all the other data that is supposed to then, that is possible... That can be accessed while this process is running. And just to give you an idea, all of these devices are essentially then also push buttons that we have on a demo. I don't have that demo here this week. But essentially it's to give you an idea that all of these devices are essentially IP-driven devices, IP-connected devices. And so we can actually get into all the other information that this device actually has that would otherwise be hidden or not be available real time in a HART or a Fieldbus type application. So what I was gonna do is then just show you where I see this happening. And so I do have an example just to give an idea of where this goes. If you were to take a Coriolis massflow meter, you are probably looking at over 480 seconds in HART to get a downloaded piece of data back from the device. So you send out the command, and now that information comes back. It's gonna chew up a lot of time.

21:11
Arnold Offner: So close to eight minutes. With PROFIBUS, it's gonna take just about three. So about 180 seconds. And then if you're looking at Ethernet APL, this can be done in 10 seconds. And to give an example of how this really works, I wanted to show you an example of how Vega does it. So Vega, and this is a very interesting comparison. You'll notice the cursor moving around here. We're actually trying to connect to a Vega device using HART, while at the same time we're watching an envelope curve here continually being updated every two seconds using APL. So you can imagine the new kinds of business cases and the new kinds of performance categories that could be created in here. And I'm sorry that I dragged this out for two minutes, but you'll notice this bar is still filling up. And so who knows whether the HART information you're ultimately gonna get when that bar closes is actually correct. Because this Vega device on this side using APL has been able to keep tabs on it every two seconds and give you data that is very, very current and very, very accurate. And so, like I said, my comment to my colleagues when I talk about the speed is there's no more time for coffee breaks. People who use HART, I think a lot of them know that whenever you send a HART command, it's always a good time to head to the coffee machine or to go take a bathroom break because you're never sure if it's gonna be done by the time you get back.

22:29
Arnold Offner: All right. And with that, I wanna leave you with a topology that is actually what I see us doing in the future. Phoenix Contact has actually developed an SPE device as well. Some of those first SPE-compatible field devices are now out there. There is a company in Germany called Jumo that's already created three different types of devices, which they demonstrated last year at a microbrewery. So they have an environmental sensor, which in one package over two wires and 1000 meters can actually give us the air quality in here, would give us a CO2 level, and would give us the humidity and temperature. They have another device that does pressure. They have another device that does flow. And then what I wanted to show you here is just the use of Ethernet APL again with a Phoenix Contact product. And all of these devices now could run out 200 meters to APL devices in the field. And so that's why I just want to show you is that we are gonna be part of this discussion moving forward as we essentially take this kind of technology to the edge. What you can also notice, and that's the beauty of a network, is you'll notice we are running a ring structure. We are running another series of Phoenix Contact PROFINET, Modbus TCP, OPC UA, or Ethernet IP type devices.

23:45
Arnold Offner: We can then run them to redundant control systems. And essentially that network now allows us to do all kinds of things. And if you would for a moment just imagine that SCADA could also be Ignition. But I feel Ignition could be also used in other parts of the plant because asset management now becomes very interesting too. In other words, it's up to now the creativity of yourselves as to how you would use Ignition on this backplane here to basically do the things related to the instrumentation here in the field. With that I was gonna just mention, I don't know, is Mark there?

24:22
Mark: Yeah.

24:23
Arnold Offner: Are you ready with the list, Mark?

24:25
Mark: I am.

24:30
Arnold Offner: Okay. Did you bring them with you as well, or are they at the table?

24:30
Mark: I brought them with me.

0:24:33.9
Arnold Offner: Alright. Five minutes, perfect. We've got five more minutes. So Mark is our local sales guy here. Thank you, Mark. Alright. So is Chris Bomarito in the audience? Nope. We'll catch up with you later. Sabrina Rodriguez in the audience?

24:54
Sabrina Rodriguez: Here.

24:54
Arnold Offner: Okay. We have a switch for you, an unmanaged switch. Is Bram Fenter here from Element 8? Nope. Justin Davies from DCI?

25:05
Justin Davies: Right here.

25:05
Arnold Offner: Okay. We have a product for you too. We're getting you a MQTT Modbus protocol converter. Is Dallas Ward from Sierra Controls here? Nope. We'll catch up with him in a moment. And then I'm looking for Ryan Birch from California Resources Corporation. Alright. We'll catch up with him later as well. Thank you. Alright. We'll catch up with you and provide you with all your samples in a moment. And with that, I was gonna let Marcus hand the microphone out to anybody who had any questions. And that leaves us with three minutes. Go ahead. Anybody have any questions? So there, I can go back to the slide. The current companies that produce the APL devices that I showed in the table, and I think there's maybe three or four that have been added to that list, have created an IP-based control system that runs on the two wires.

25:54
Mark: Okay. So...

25:54
Arnold Offner: The switch, in turn, can still, in this current configuration, because there is a project out there right now that everybody's scrambling to get their hands on, the switch that we have also has proxy functionality. So we can substitute, if the APL device is not yet ready, we can use a PROFIBUS PA device of the same type. But if you think about 4-20, if it's a 4-20 device, it probably didn't do much more. If it was a HART device or a Fieldbus device, it probably does more. And so to your question, I would say it's not as much a 4-20 as much as it is more of the sophisticated devices that those field device manufacturers have never really been able to get into the marketplace.

26:32
Arnold Offner: Hope that answers your question. Yeah. If you look at IO-Link, I would say complementary, only because IO-Link is predicated more towards the factory automation space. And IO-Link is actually working in two other spaces still. They are starting to do what they call IO-Link Wireless, and they're also creating what they call IO-Link Safety. Think about IO-Link as truly being something that gets used in the factory automation space, whereas APL and SPE are gonna be covering essentially that entire market space, so both the EX and the non-EX market. So, complementary. Yeah. The only challenge is with three wires, it doesn't tie in very nicely to the two. And I have seen companies already start working on media converters that will convert IO-Link to SPE. But then your challenge still is you're talking about a gateway, and we're trying to eliminate gateways. Because IO-Link is a master-slave type configuration, and so it doesn't really have a great way to connect into Ethernet networks above.

27:38
Audience Member 1: For device manufacturers, do you see a big adoption happening for this on the end devices?

27:43
Arnold Offner: I would say end devices, the adoption is probably gonna come from best-in-class device manufacturers who have always had a lot more intelligence inside the device. So if you looked at that name, you're probably looking at really high-end devices that these companies produce. I think the challenge in the SPE space is think about it more of being a combination of devices just over two wires. Because what I probably forgot to mention is that over my 1000 meters at 10 megabits a second, we're also pushing out power. So we're doing the same thing we do with 4-20, but we are actually sending out power. And those power categories are then also defined. I don't want to go into too much of the weeds on that, but essentially it's a powered two-wire system.

28:23
Audience Member 1: So outside the working group, obviously they're adopting, they're part of it, but do you see other companies looking at it, asking about it, trying to get involved?

28:32
Arnold Offner: Yes, yes. And like I said, they are then working through their standards development organizations. So in the PROFINET space, currently in the Ethernet IP space, they've already created something called a constrained in-cabinet type technique, also using single-pair Ethernet. And so you're slowly but surely gonna see more of those companies step up and develop that kind of thing. Yes. Well, thank you very much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. I want to wish you a wonderful rest of the day, safe travels back home. And it's been nice meeting all of you. Thank you.