Omniflex Industrial Network reduces costs

The well proven Conet token passing deterministic network designed by Omniflex over 20 years ago has always enabled plant engineers to find the most cost-effective way of transferring data from the remote point of measurement to the point of monitoring or control.

Conet is still the number one choice of network for hundreds of applications around the world allowing customers to make use of existing cables for plant data communications with huge cost savings. On some applications, this saving has been up to a million pounds on installation of new cables, trenches, cable trays and scaffolding etc.

Conet is specified to run on a Screened Twisted Pair cable up to distances of 10km without repeaters as one network. Over the years Omniflex has developed hardware platforms to accommodate the demand for complex networking topologies. Unlimited multiple Conet networks can be interconnected as Star, Bus and Ring topologies. It has also been utilised on hundreds of cables where the cable is not characterised, enabling the use of two existing cores in a cable which could be unshielded, ungrounded and/or in poor condition.

Some very large distributed plant networked I/O systems have been fully integrated without the need to run any new cables at all by just utilising spare cores in existing multi-core cables or even old spare cores in telephone cables or Instrumentation Cable. The ability to multiplex many signals down a single twisted pair has not gone un-noticed in many plants saving many pairs in instrument cables and allowing many devices to share the same cable.

Plant communications technology has also advanced dramatically in the last decade. The range of instrumentation capable of being networked grows daily. Using Conet it is easy to connect disparate instruments and networks into a unified infrastructure, to make information available for real-time management and control but most importantly Conet can use your existing cables in most cases. The Conet communication infrastructure can blend many communications standards such as RS232/485, Ethernet, radio, GSM/GPRS into a network of networks - an inter-networking technology that integrates these standard networks into a unified plant-wide I/O and information system.