During the recent annual SAIMC Gala Dinner, the branch was awarded Silver status with a score of 88,3% on the annual score sheet. The score put us ahead of the other branches, which is a huge success as last year we did not even qualify for Bronze. Thank you to all of the Secunda committee members for their hard work and dedication.
October Technology Evening
On Thursday 6 October, Clint Viviers from Yokogawa presented the topic of ISA100. ISA is the abbreviation for International Society of Automation, which was founded in 2005. The aim of this standard is to scrutinise the functionality and security of industrial wireless technology in the before the approval thereof. The ISA-100 standard was developed by this society to define the functionality and security of industrial wireless technology; it can be interpreted as a protocol of industrial wireless transmission and receiving.
At this stage, industrial wireless is used mainly for indication and focuses on field instrumentation. Clint touched on a few advantages of the technology such as reduced installation costs due to the elimination of cables, trunking, junction boxes etc. There is also no loop checking required. An important thing to consider is that wireless technology works on the line of sight (LOS) principle, meaning that field instruments need to be able to ‘see’ each other for signal transfer to be successful.
One of the advantages of ISA100 versus wirelessHART is that it is multiprotocol enabled and caters for HART, Foundation Fieldbus, Profibus and ModbusRTU. ISA100 wireless security operates at two levels, in the transport layer and the data-link layer, according to the ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute (WCI) website. “Transport layer security protects the data and provides end-to-end assurance that mission-critical messages received are secret and authentic. Data-link layer security protects the network. It provides hop-by-hop assurance that each message is securely transmitted to the next hop, with detailed performance and security diagnostics accumulated at each point.” This is definitely a solution to consider when faced with installations where cable routing is difficult, or over long distances.
All the branch presentations earn CPD points for ECSA registered persons and any enquiries can be directed to branch chairman Johan Maritz, 082 856 3865, [email protected].
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