Case Studies: Rosemount

Company: For over 45 years, Rosemount Inc. has been recognized as the world leader in the design and manufacture of instrumentation, including a complete line of pressure, temperature, flow and level products. By a margin of 4:1, Rosemount Inc. is also recognized as the after-sale service leader.

Product: One of Rosemount's many measurement products is an Ethernet-accessible interface module which concentrates and publishes sensor data from connected Foundation Fieldbus devices.

Challenge: A high profile Rosemount customer requested several new features for this module:

• Wireless Ethernet access to the module

• Concentrated access from the module to a wireless mesh of sensor devices

• Management support for HART protocol devices instead of the currently supported Fieldbus protocol.

With limited expertise in the area of wireless technologies, Rosemount needed specific expertise for their software team to tap into to address the challenges presented by their customer's requests. They needed an experienced team of engineers to make use of the existing framework - Object Oriented methods with C++ for device management and Java (J2ME) for web configuration and data presentation - while incorporating the new wireless technology and implementing the necessary subset of the HART protocol.

Solution: WynEdge Software was selected by Rosemount and provided a senior team of engineers to develop a solution. WynEdge consultants utilized the C++ ACE library to quickly construct an object-oriented HART master application which would manage Rosemount's wireless mesh of temperature monitors.

Using Java applications and servlets, WynEdge developed configuration and diagnostic utilities for the Wi-Fi Ethernet interface and the wireless mesh sensor network. The temperature data was made available in a variety of database formats, and also published via OPC for Windows client.

WynEdge staff traveled to the field trial location, supplying expertise during the initial setup and installation of the wireless network in a large industrial facility.

Result: Rosemount's customers are leveraging the wireless mesh technology to measure critical temperature data that was previously impossible or costly to retrieve in a useful, safe, and timely manner. As Rosemount's customer environments are often highly hazardous (i.e. oil and gas or chemical related industries), the ability to provide safer and more reliable systems such as this are critical.