Potential Places for Wireless in Safety

The use of wireless devices has become ubiquitous in our lives, and is growing in the process, oil and gas industries. While first used for data communication with remote locations (e.g., SCADA), wireless applications have blossomed inside the fence of many plants and facilities. These applications generally started as monitoring points in applications where copper wire was not readily available or expensive to run, or in applications that were not feasible with wiring — generally in applications you couldn’t do in the past.

Success in these projects led to a desire to expand into control and, later, into safety applications. Using wireless technology for process control, which might have seemed almost blasphemous just a few years ago, is today gaining broader acceptance, at least for non-critical loops. A good deal of skepticism remains for critical process control and safety applications.

Read the rest of this article from our sister publication Control Global.