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Wedron Silica, a subsidiary of Fairmount Mineral has chosen Westermo’shigh-security Lynx switches for harsh industrial environments. Theirapplication develops a full industrial Ethernet redundancy ring that monitors and controls the entire mining facility
Fairmount Minerals is one of the largest producers of industrial sand in the USA. ItsIllinois based subsidiary, Wedron Silica, has been in operation for over 100 years, producing high-purity, round-grain silica sand. This sand is mined from the St. Peters Sandstone which is a 200 million-year-old sand deposit that runs from Minnesota to Oklahoma. More than 50 hourly and 10 supervisory personnel manage the production of approximately 10,000 tons of sand each day. The facility’s biggest producing segment is for the fracturing sand market.
The Wedron Silica plantoperates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All production is managed through an industrial Ethernet network. This network exchanges data fromhydraulic high pressure mining canons. Additionally, data from cameraslinked to the control centre via fibre-optics help to control and adjust truck loading as well as the sand drying rooms. The data monitoring and control systems need to be of the highest reliability levels, specifically in such a harsh industrial environment as mining.
”Our data network has been working using the Ethernet protocol for 10 years, but this is the first time that we have installed a full redundancy ring” says Frank Barnes, Technical Manager at Wedron Silicate. “There were several reasons for choosing Westermo’s Lynx range of switches, like the strong harsh environment compliancy, the off-the-shelf redundant ring capability, and the world’s fastest data recovery time of 20ms. Particularly, we appreciate the easy configuration and monitoringof the switches as well as the no-charge software updates. We have also had very close technical collaborations with Trond Grendar from Westermo and Doug Smith of the John R. Willis company, an independent manufacturer’s representative for Gross Automation, Westermo’s distributor in North America”, adds Barnes.
The ring portion of the network consists of 11 of the Lynx 1400-series switches with 6 Lynx 400-series switches on branch runs. The ring switches are located in the plant process buildings and are named for their location. All are mountedin dust tight boxes and powered by 24VDC power supplies that are connected to a battery backup. The ring network is kept powered for over 2hours in the event of a power outage. All of the control and monitoring information is passed on Westermo’s network.
L1400 and L400 support IMGP protocol (Internet Group Management Protocol) providing filtering techniques to control the flow of data around the ring in sucha way as to optimise the bandwidth, and to secure the network operation. The IGMP Server (router) implemented, which means that no externalIGMP server on the network is necessary. It is also integrated with the FRNT feature, which means that the multicast filters will be updated within 20ms in case of any network failure. The Lynx switches fullysupport QoS (Quality of Service) with four priority queues and strictpriority scheduling as well as HoL (Head of Line Blocking Prevention).This is also a key issue for process applications such as Wedron’s, because it achieves determinism for real time critical applications.
The 400 and 1400 Lynx switches have a military design with afull metal housing (IP40). They operate under a temperature range from–40 to 70°C and have a DC power range from 19 to 60 VDC. They have nomoving parts or electrolytic capacitors, low power consumption with redundancy, are DIN rail mounted and support long cable.
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