The industrial sector encompasses a diverse set of market segments. However, the overall industrial market is undergoing several key changes driven by environmental concerns and economic pressures.
With the current global emphasis on environmental protection, energy efficiency and sustainable resource management, the industrial sector is being affected by new legislation and customer pressure to reduce costs and conserve resources. These pressures are resulting in an increased focus on end application designs aimed at minimizing power consumption, reducing scrap, and eliminating downtime.
Embedded control and standard connectivity options, wired or wireless, provide a means of enabling greater productivity in industrial systems. A major factor is the ability to increase the networking between process steps or between equipment in factories and buildings. By enabling efficient data flow to centralized control points, new ìconnectedî applications can improve overall system efficiency while increasing installation reliability.
This article covers some of the main driving elements in todayís industrial applications and discusses how advances in semiconductor components are enabling better energy efficiency in the industrial market and improved connectivity for more efficient industrial installation control.
Energy management
Increasing energy efficiency in the commercial and industrial sectors offers sizable opportunities for cost savings while minimizing greenhouse gas emissions. These sectors contribute about 37 percent of the greenhouse gases in the United States, with buildings alone contributing 15 percent, as shown in Figure 1.
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As electricity is a primary energy source in industrialized countries, reducing overall electricity consumption is becoming a critical challenge for the coming years.
According to the Energy Information Administrationís (EIA) International Energy Outlook 2002, overall worldwide electricity consumption will increase annually by 2.7 percent from 1999 to 2020. The most rapid growth in electricity use is projected for Asia, which is expected to consume more than twice as much electricity in the next 20 years as it did in 1999. Chinaís electricity consumption accounts for a significant amount of this growth.
In the United States, electricity consumption is expected to grow by 75 percent from 2005 to 2030 (source: EIA AEO2006). Driven by service sector growth, commercial use is expected to see the biggest rise (see Figure 2).
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Meanwhile, electricity generation is trying to keep pace, but the costs of adding generation can be high. Figure 3 depicts projected electricity generation in the United States (source: MIT Energy Club 2006).
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Motor-driven equipment accounts for 64 percent of the electricity consumed in the U.S. industrial sector. Within the nationís most energy-intensive industries, motor systems consume approximately 290 billion kWhr per year. This consumption equals the electricity production of 180 fossil fuel power units, at 350 MW each, or more than 40 nuclear power plants.
In these industries alone, improvements to motor systems could yield dramatic energy and cost savings. The key to these savings is applying energy-efficient equipment or implementing sound energy management practices.
The buildings sector uses approximately 66 percent of the electric energy in the United States. Electricity consumption in buildings doubled between 1989 and 2005. If this growth rate is sustained, electricity demand in buildings will increase another 150 percent by 2030 (source: U.S. Department of Energy).
Embedded control technology lies at the heart of future generations of energy-efficient systems. Technology exists to help tackle energy efficiency on many levels, from reducing electrical consumption to controlling other energy sources more efficiently.
By using more intelligent and accurate control of equipment such as HVAC, lighting control systems, and elevators, it is already possible to significantly reduce the electricity consumption of a new generation of intelligent building systems. The relatively simple installation of presence-detection systems in a building, coupled with lighting and HVAC control systems, automatic shutters with sun detection, and local heating and cooling system optimization, can provide significant opportunities for electricity savings.
Newly developed electrical motor technologies (such as brushless DC or three-phase AC motors) combined with more accurate control algorithms are making it possible to adjust the speed and torque of the application to system requirements and improve the energy efficiency of appliances and industrial systems. For example, variable speed control and improved motor efficiency in an HVAC system or industrial pump can increase overall system efficiency by up to 50 percent (source: U.S. Department of Energy, Industrial Technologies Program 2006).
Electrical distribution also can be optimized to user profiles thanks to next-generation automatic metering reader and automatic metering management systems. In these systems data on electricity usage is automatically collected and sent to a concentrator using wireless or powerline modem technology, and then transferred via GPRS to a central database for further analysis and optimization of the network load.
New generations of highly integrated microcontrollers and digital signal controllers with embedded flash technology are adding cost-effective intelligence to industrial systems.
Newly developed low-power wireless technologies coupled with intelligent sensors are enabling cost-effective deployment of wireless sensor networks in buildings and factories, and high-performance processors allow real-time processing and data transfer with enhanced security features.
Freescaleís embedded control and connectivity technology is enabling the development of more energy-efficient products in various industrial applications. Examples will follow in Part 2 of this series.
Industrial connectivity
Responding to competitive and economic pressures and environmental legislation, manufacturers are focusing on efficient material usage and waste reduction. From a financial aspect, centralized control and identifying potential problems enables designers to manage quality and investigate the root cause analysis of wastage occurrences. Centralized control enables efficient resource management and energy efficiency not only on the factory floor, but also in office buildings. In fact, centralized control for building facilities is considered a major growth market.
Interoperability is critical to centralized management. Increased use of standard protocols such as Ethernet helps enable smoother interoperability between the factory floor and the office. Industrial Ethernet installation is expected to grow by more than 50 percent annually over the next three years (source: ARC Advisory Group).
Research from the ARC Advisory Group also shows that interest in network-enabled machinery is surging. Total shipments of industrial Ethernet nodes are expected to increase from 840,000 nodes in 2004 to 6.7 million nodes by 2009, the research firm predicts.
While backward compatibility remains a key requirement, efficiently operating new factory installations requires seamless integration between the new installations and existing installed systems based on proprietary solutions.
One increasing trend in the industry is improving seamless communications between the different sections of the manufacturing process and the management control function. This data management can be a key contributor to the efficiency of an industrial unit, in particular, managing diverse process steps across multiple locations. Data access, whether at the source or from a central point, provides greater control over these processes. This is a main driving factor in the move toward Ethernet and standardized protocol usage in industrial areas as a cost-effective alternative to existing protocols.
Reusing the wide range of Ethernet tools and equipment to minimize introduction and running costs is resulting in a move away from the overhead of maintaining proprietary solutions. Semiconductor components require enabling interfaces to multiple protocols as these gateway functions become more commonplace. However, this interconnectivity must be enabled with a minimum cost and power consumption overhead. Meeting this need requires an increased number of microprocessors capable of handling multiple protocols, providing flexibility for multiple interfaces to be controlled while making data management between different protocols reliable and efficient.
Areas such as fieldbus gateways, which provide communication to the factory floor and process devices, are often connected via a variety of popular protocols. According to the research firm IMS and as presented in Figures 4 and 5, the total number of connected nodes is expected to grow from 13 million units in 2005 to 26 million units in 2010. While Ethernet-based protocols will see the most significant growth (18 percent CAGR from 2005-2010 in number of nodes), some already established standards such as CAN and PROFIBUS are expected to retain a significant share in the industrial market.
Trends in Ethernet-based protocols
Ethernet is now regarded as a viable industrial communications protocol, and its use is expanding to encompass many real-time needs, further securing its position in this area. Real-time Ethernet is rapidly establishing itself as an alternative to existing fieldbus standards and becoming one of the fastest-growing segments of the industrial communications market. Factors driving the acceptance of Ethernet in industrial applications include:
n The ability to integrate the factory floor with the office network and support protocols, such as SNMP, FTP, MIME, and HTTP, and to communicate across servers and routers where TCP/IP is required
n The ability to connect nodes distributed over much wider areas
n Access to a widely used and well-proven protocol supported by a huge range of inexpensive components
n Greater bandwidth supporting the data rates needed by more intelligent industrial devices
n Higher-speed communication allowing high levels of synchronization able to support motion control applications
n Remote configuration and error handling
TCP/IP-based communications over Ethernet is non-deterministic, and reaction times are routinely greater than 100 ms. Many common industrial applications require response times in the region of 5-10 ms, with some hard real-time applications requiring response times of less than 1 ms.
To meet the needs of this market, numerous standards are emerging that define higher-level protocols designed to provide well-defined, deterministic communications using Ethernet. For more detail on the protocols, see the protocol standards summary.
The emergence of wireless in industrial and building automation
Designers can overcome the restrictions of implementing connectivity into existing sites by using emerging wireless technologies. New standards are emerging, and active discussions in committees are driving the convergence toward common platform and interoperability. The goal of these emerging standards is to address the need for a cost-effective, standards-based wireless networking solution that supports low to medium data rates (<500 kbps), low power consumption, security, and high reliability.
For the past few years, industry groups such as the ZigBee Alliance, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and ISA have been working on building communications protocols that leverage the IEEE 802.15.4 industry standard, a low-rate Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) that defines the physical and data link layers. At the network and transport layers, multiple solutions exist, such as the ZigBee protocol, IETF, ISA, and others, including proprietary protocols.
The marketplace may have room for all these approaches. For example, the ZigBee protocol is rapidly growing in building automation, whereas the ISA SP100.11a working group expects to have a standard out next year. WirelessHART also would seem to be a natural fit for process-based applications in the plant and is optimized for factory automation and process control. Meanwhile, IETFís IPv6-based, low-power WPAN (6LoWPAN), which uses an Internet Protocol (IP), may be more suitable for enterprise environments. In the short term, these vying standards are confusing; in the long term, they could coexist.
Two standards groups, ISA and the HART Communication Foundation, are developing complementary and overlapping industrial wireless protocol standards. The proposed WirelessHART standard, for example, defines a protocol to enable HART-compatible instruments and other devices to communicate securely over an 802.15.4 mesh network. The proposed ISA100 standard would do the same, while also defining different wireless applications and supporting multiple message types.
To summarize the move toward industrial connectivity, it is clear that the development of IEEE 1588-based real-time Ethernet based protocols will only serve to further proliferate Ethernet networks into industrial systems. However, demand still exists for fieldbus protocols, such as CAN-based networks in applications where there is a high level of EMC noise/interference.
Wireless networks are also expected to continue to penetrate industrial applications. In many instances, these networks will be applied in systems that are not backwards compatible with the multiple forms of wired communications options.
Examples
Part 2 of this series coming in March 2008 will discuss examples of applications implementing technology addressing these trends.
Bruno Baylac is director of marketing for Freescale based in Toulouse, France, covering microcontrollers, digital signal controllers, analog[
], sensors, and low-power radio products in the consumer and industrial markets in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). Brunoís first position with Motorola was European program manager for Seamless Silicon Systems (S3), based in Munich, Germany. In 2000, he became operations manager for the emerging business portion of the Body Electronics & Occupant Safety Division, during which time he played a key role in the launch of Motorolaís first microcontroller + RF and remote keyless entry solution. Bruno also served as strategic marketing manager and global OEM market operations manager for the 8/16-bit Products Division.
Gordon Padkin is a product marketing engineer for Freescale based in the East Kilbride facility in Scotland, working in the Consumer & Industrial Operation in EMEA primarily focusing on the microcontroller portfolio for consumer and industrial markets. Since joining Freescale in 1999, Gordon has worked in several areas ranging from marketing research in the automotive chassis market to product marketing and management for the legacy 32-bit 68K and M.Core products as well as the new 32-bit ColdFire family.
Freescale Semiconductor
See also: Industrial connectivity standards summary
