Renewable Energy
Location: China
Project Introduction
China’s national wind power capacity is expected to reach 30 million W by 2015. By conservative estimation, China's wind power capacity will be up to 80 million W by 2020. The dramatic increase in the number of wind power plants thereby requires a great number of wind farm information management systems and remote wind turbine monitoring systems. Since these systems are used in harsh environments, they need the support of managed industrial Ethernet switches with wide temperature ranges. Recently, a large manufacturer of wind power turbines purchased Advantech's EKI series as the main network switches for its management system.
System Requirements
Wind power is often used in harsh environments with high day-night temperature difference and serious dust/sand storms. The rugged electronic-magnetic environment of the motor control system requires an industrial switch with excellent anti-electromagnetic-interference capability and long MTBF. In order to enhance communication reliability, the user has to set up a redundant ring with short failover time. When any error occurs to communication network, the switch should smoothly switch to the redundant backup line.
To ensure data security of remote monitoring, the switch should be configured with comprehensive network security. After thorough consideration, the customer purchased Advantech's EKI-7554SI and EKI-4654R as the main switches for the network architecture of their wind farm management and wind turbine remote monitoring system.
Project Implementation
| EKI-7554SI |
4+2 SC Type Fiber Optic Managed Industrial Ethernet Switch with Wide Temperature |
| EKI-4654R |
24+2 SFP Port Managed Redundant Industrial Ethernet Switch |
System Diagram
System Description
Each wind turbine is installed with an Advantech's EKI-7554SI managed redundant switch at its foundation; this forms a redundant ring through single mode fiber connection. At the same time, EKI-7554SI of each ring network of the monitoring center is connected to EKI-4654R, the 24-port redundant managed Gigabit Ethernet switch of Advantech, through copper interface. The monitoring center's server and engineer station form a WLAN system by using EKI-4654R. Regarding to industrial field's requirement for real-time performance, the system adopts the concept of ring design and thus avoids the influence of single link failure on the network.
Conclusion
Advantages of Advantech's industrial Ethernet switch are as follows:
- Quick redundancy
- Anti-interference -- suitable for harsh environment
- Excellent temperature & installation mode flexibility
- Advantages of power supply and installation mode
- Safety advantages