Dearborn Electronics India Pvt Ltd (DE) and a leading Indian valve manufacturing company teamed up when the valve manufacturer decided to add capabilities including electronic positioners and controls to its line of valve products.
“This move would give us an edge in the valve industry, as we could become a strategic partner with many of its customers in the process industry”, the management team concluded. The long, arduous journey culminated in an excellent product, a valve positioner with PID control and a HART 4-20 loop powered controller.
At the outset, they focused on the interoperability of the valve solutions, which is very important for integration with the asset management system in plants that use multiple field devices hosted over a number of network gateways.
“The solution should be independent of the communication protocol and software environment of either device or host systems,” said the R&D manager at the valve manufacturing company.
DE came out with a FDT Technology-based solution. “FDT Technology standardizes the communication interface between field devices and systems and allows any device to be accessed from any host through any protocol,” the DE general manager said. DE also stressed that interoperability through FDT Technology would facilitate in the ability to add other Fieldbus stacks like Foundation Field bus, Profibus, and others on its valve positioners in the future.
DE built expertise in field device integration and FDT Technology while working with organizations like ABB and Schneider. Over time, DE developed several FDT tools and components which help reduce the time to market including:
• DTM reusable core components for development of the Device and Communication DTMs for FDT 1.2, 1.2.1.
• DTM Wizard, a tool to develop device DTMs in less time and maintain compatibility to any Frame Application for DTM development.
• Communication DTM/ Device DTM supporting CANOpen and Modbus TCP protocols.
• Customized FDT Frame Application
• “Test complete” based automated DTM verification and validation.
These solutions are extensible to develop the device, communication and Gateway DTMs with HART, Profibus and other Fieldbus protocols. DTM development using DE DTM Core Components is compatible to any standard FDT confirmed container application (Frame Application).
To date, DE has developed the Smart Valve Positioner with a device type manager (DTM) for the HART protocol used for configuration and calibration of the Positioner.
Main features of the DTM include:
• Customized high definition User Interfaces (UI)
• Customized parameter indexing
• Specific interface handling
• Customizable XML data
• Integrate the help files based on the Help document provided by Customer
• Providing backward compatibility with FDT 1.2 specifications
• Develop an Installation setup application.
“We can claim now that we have a wonderful solution that provides great differentiation to our range of valve products” said the valve manufacturing team.
For more information about our services, please visit: www.deindia.com
Author: Ratnesh Kumar, Dearborn Electronics India Pvt. Ltd
