Industrial Automation Magazine India

Qualifying Ethernet-APL for use in energy systems

Published on : Friday 16-06-2023

The APLES project is a cooperation project with participants from ABB, Phoenix, Endress & Hauser and AUMA.

Oslo, June 15, 2023 – An Ethernet-APL demonstration project in Energy Systems, APLES, shows that it is fully possible to apply Ethernet-APL technology using existing installed field cables.

The results from the demo are really promising. Allowing us to reuse our offshore cabling infrastructure is a huge benefit, lowering the threshold for introducing the Ethernet-APL technology in our existing process control systems, says Anders Bjørsvik, senior advisor automation in Equinor. Halvor Landet, CEO from Fieldbus International AS, says: We have run a lot of tests comparing an Ethernet-APL reference cable and BFOU cables used in the oil and gas industry checking the quality of communication. We were a bit surprised to see that the oil and gas BFOU cables offered significant lower package losses compared to the APL reference cable.

The APLES project is a cooperation project with participants from ABB (control system), Phoenix (trunk switches and field switches), Endress & Hauser (instruments) and AUMA (actuator).

Equinor is a broad international energy company headquartered in Norway with 22,000 employees in 30 countries.

Fieldbus International AS, established in 1993, is a Norwegian company and is a worldwide provider of fieldbus network products and services to vendors and users in the process control and offshore industry It specialises on products based on theHART, WirelessHART, Profibus, Profinet, Foundation Fieldbus, HART-IP and NB-IoT technologies.

Advanced Physical Layer, APL, has the following characteristic properties: Single pair wire with power, speed is 10 Mbit/s, and operation in hazardous environments. It is compatible with industrial Ethernet protocols.

Contact information: Arne Tyssoe, [email protected]