Ormen Lange, in the North Sea off the Norwegian coast (some 900 metres below the sea's surface), will be the second largest gasfield on the Norwegian continental shelf and from October 2007 a major new gas source for Europe. Gas processing from Ormen Lange will take place at Nyhamna in Norway and will be supplied to the UK.
Westermo's Ethernet switches which feature 1 μs time synchronisation and 30 ms reconfiguration time have been chosen by ABB to equip the fibre-optics network of the Safety and Automation System (SAS) of Nyhamna's on-shore plant.
All the information for the process will be handled by an Ethernet network including 150 Westermo time synchronisation and redundancy ring switches.
ABB is in charge of Nyhamna's SAS and PIMS (process information and management system), which both operate on Westermo's Ethernet network. The software and hardware that will monitor the plant include:
* 2000 equipment asset monitors.
* Applications for daily operation, maintenance and planning.
* OPC (OLE for Process Control) interface to third party systems (SAP, metering, vibration monitoring, valve monitoring system).
ABB is also responsible for three pipeline protection systems (Nyhamna, Sleipner off-shore platform, and Easington gas reception centre in the UK). Their purpose is to protect the pipeline against over-pressure.
The ABB control system is distributed across controllers, servers and clients which are connected together on several network levels via Westermo's switches. There are about 150 T208 and R208 switches across the systems.
The T208 switch incorporates NTP/SNTP (network time protocol/simple network time protocol). This allows SNTP packets to be time-stamped. Westermo provides accuracy of 1 μs or better in this technology. In industrial automation, Ethernet networks have always been limited by the latency jitter of data packet transmission inside the switches. Depending on the network load, data packet size and the number of switches between the server and the client, data transmission inside an Ethernet switch introduces time latency jitter of up to several milliseconds. A packet that enters the switch first can even go out after one that arrives later due to switch QoS techniques. Furthermore, a network with several off-the-shelf switches will accumulate time synchronisation errors for each switch on the network path between the time server and time client. Precise data analysis needed for process automation then becomes impossible. With the Nyhamna plant's 150 switches, this time-stamping is critical. Westermo's T208 switch allows events to be time-stamped with high precision providing a full and exact history of data events.
The R208 is designed to enable industrial Ethernet networks to be installed in a multiple redundant ring configuration. Those rings also have the possibility to be redundant themselves. This eliminates network failure caused by either fibre or copper backbone failure.
Stig Andheim, ABB project manager says: "We selected Westermo's switches first of all for the clock synchronisation functionality. Specifically, for the external time synchronisation with the GPS receiver. In that kind of application, a very high reliability of all network-transmitted information is needed. Full time traceability of data that is transmitted via the switch is then provided. With the universal GPS time, we ensure that all equipment works with the same time reference."
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