Advise on area of improvement

[james87989469]

I'm a Student who is conducting research on Fieldbus protocol for my master's programme final year project. Notice there's a huge amount of devices/ equipments in the market and was wondering if there is any needs in any area to which there are requirements to improve on.

I'm currently looking into the power supply/conditioner and repeater area. Would appreciate if experienced user would provide feedback on the problems encounter to which improvement might be required.

[rezabejd]

James,

I think an interesting thesis topic might be invetigating whether a "physical layer" diagnostic can be derived / inferrred from device communication statistics. By "physical layer" I mean the physical fieldbus network itself, the wire, termination hardware, power conditioners, etc.

While there are many diagnostics originating from the FF devices themselves to inform the user about their well-being, what we've found in practice is that the devices as a rule are extremely reliable. Most of the issues we encounter have to do with some corruption of the wire, some power conditioner issue, or sloppy / loose terminations, for example.

The host system we use at my site generates communication statistics on a per-segment and per-device basis, but to my knowledge these are not used for any alerts or alarms. Relcom (http://www.relcominc.com) makes a very handy and easy-to-use handheld devices for troubleshooting segments, but when one gets into a plant with scores or hundreds of segments, it may become impractical to do "manual" surveys as a routine practice. It would be much better to have an "automated" alert that flagged any segment with suspicious communictaion issues.