Alicat™ Scientific adds PROFINET industrial communications protocols to its flow and pressure control instruments
Alicat Scientific, of Tucson, Arizona, announces that it has added PROFINET™ to its offerings of industrial protocols for Alicat mass flow controllers, pressure controllers, mass flow meters, and pressure transducers. Through PLCs, manufacturers and industrial processes can control activities and collect data faster than humanly possible, from Alicat devices with industrial protocols.
Part of the fast-growing industrial ethernet-based spectrum of communication protocols, PROFINET is now perhaps the most widely used industrial protocol in the world. Automation engineers and integrators assembling PROFINET installations can now take advantage of Alicat instruments’ multi-variate, rapid response times, and large turn-down ratios. With Alicat’s complexity-reducing features like closed-loop pressure, PROFINET analyzers can use fewer devices, at lower costs of materials, with fewer maintenance points. Fluid and gas processes with high-precision, low pressure differential requirements will be able to benefit from Alicat’s Whisper™ series of instruments.
Mass flow controllers, including liquid controllers, as well as meters, have the dual RJ45 Ethernet connectors. But an IP 66 rated device will have water-resistant connectors.
Alicat’s instruments with PROFINET have been certified conformant to the PROFI standard. Ferdi Faas, General Manager of Alicat Europe said, “With the addition of PROFINET certified protocol, Alicat instruments are offered for most of the leading industrial communications. Altogether, our communications options are compatible with nearly two thirds of Europe’s—and the world’s—installed industrial networks. Around the globe, labs and factories are making processes faster, smarter, and safer by using Alicat’s industrial instrumentation—adding PROFINET helps many more customers take advantage of our data-rich devices.”
Automation engineers, system integrators and factories using industrial protocols with Alicat flow and pressure devices are performing such varied activities as perfecting hydrogen-electric energy generation, spinning glass optical fibers for telecommunications, testing rocket parts for leaks, heating furnaces for ceramics, and generating pharmaceuticals through biochemical processing.