Field Bus Preventive Maintenance

[CHRISC1024]

Something I've always recommended was to obtain baseline readings using either an FBT-6 or the P&F portable diagnostic kit. Both of these generate reports that you can save for future reference if you want to do periodic maintenance or an issue arises on a segment.

When I use to do FF commissioning, this was something we provided to the client so they had a snapshot of various parameters to compare to if they suspect an issue on a particular segment.

As for periodic inspection, if you do not have diagnostics built in, using one of the portable devices mentioned above and doing a sampling as John recommended would be adequate. If you are experiencing any device communication issues, I'd start with these segments.

Many times, failures can be tracked down to water infiltration, poor terminations or wiring not run properly to keep separation from 120VAC and above wiring. These were the 3 most common causes of failures we found when performing audits. And as Mr. Berge says, this was never limited to FF. We saw these issues with FF, DeviceNet, ProfiBus, Modbus and Ethernet.