Posted by: Heather MacKenzie on May 22, 2013

As industrial Ethernet is increasingly adopted, the purchasing of Ethernet network components often falls to electrical or installation contractors. If you are one of these people in charge of Ethernet cabling for an industrial application, you may think that you can save money by using commercial (office) cabling.

Unfortunately, the money you might save will disappear the first time there is a failure.

For example, a contractor installed a fire protection system for a large power generation plant, including the cabling. When it came time to run the network, it didn’t work.

Investigations revealed that the contractor had installed 4km (2.485 miles) of speaker wire instead of the industrial Ethernet twisted-pair cable specified by the engineers. Their reasoning: “It looked the same as the other wire”!

The outcome was that the contractor had to go back, pull the wire out, replace it . . . and pay for all of it. There goes the profit on that job.

Posted by: Steve Lampen on May 21, 2013

At NAB our Corporate Communications Director, Eric Ehlers, shot a little video of me discussing some of our latest cable innovations. We posted it on LinkedIn but I thought I'd like to share it with you all in my blog as well. Let me know if you have any questions or ideas for new products you'd like to see by dropping a note in the comment box below.

Posted by: Heather MacKenzie on May 14, 2013

Many industrial manufacturers are looking for ways to reduce their power consumption both to reduce costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Industry accounts for over 40% of worldwide energy consumption and 65% of its power demand comes from electric motor-driven systems. One way to reduce greatly reduce the energy required to run motor systems is to use what are called “VFD”s.

Posted by: Steve Lampen on May 09, 2013

Just before NAB we issued a blog post Telescopic Shields PART 1 – Looking at Different Shield Options. I know you've all been holding your breath waiting for part 2 and here it is!

Last time we left this off we had been looking at various kinds of shields, starting with foil shields and the different kinds of braid shields, serve/spiral, French Braid and a full braid. None of these are effective below 1,000 Hz. There is only one kind of shield that has any significant effect at those low frequencies, such as 50 Hz/60 Hz power frequencies, and that is metal conduit. A perfect metal conduit is around 30 dB shield effectiveness at 60 Hz. That's not a lot. In fact, those twisted pairs, run as balanced lines, are your only effective way to get rid of low-frequency noise. And our Bonded-Pairs and starquad cables are the best at those low frequencies. (I'll refer again to my blog on Balanced Lines.)

Posted by: Heather MacKenzie on May 07, 2013

The Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) is on in full force right now and Belden’s booth (7236) has been busy. Liaising with our booth staff I have heard that safety and security are hot topics with attendees this year. Well here is a topic they should know about, that is, why offshore networks need SCADA security with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).

Posted by: Eric Byres on May 06, 2013

Our last blog, contributed by Thomas Nuth, highlighted the fact that industrial cyber security is now being discussed by heads of state within the international community - the Executive Order – Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity signed by President Obama in February of this year being just one indication of the importance being attached to this issue.


Let’s continue the discussion...

Posted by: Heather MacKenzie on May 02, 2013

Keeping operations running at target production rates is the goal of many of our customers. The cost of downtime is particularly expensive if you are operating an offshore oil and gas rig. Next week the energy professionals who do that remarkable work are gathering in Houston for the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC).

Posted by: Heather MacKenzie on April 26, 2013

As industrial manufacturers and operators continually work to be globally competitive, one area they look at for cost and efficiency savings is network infrastructure. The magnitude of the change happening with industrial infrastructure is very large -- and the opportunity to play a small part in this change is one reason I have recently moved from our Tofino Security brand to the Industrial IT group.