Taking the Hazard Out of Networked Lighting in Industrial Settings
Chuck Ross
Connected lighting is becoming the norm, now, in many industrial applications, including those involving hazardous locations. As facilities upgrade from incandescent, fluorescent and HID systems to LED designs – or even from first-generation LED to more advanced offerings – it can make a lot of sense to choose networked fixtures. Networking can enable operators to address all luminaires, systemwide, or tweak individual units to provide higher or lower light output as needed, all from a single app or desktop application.
“Connected lighting is not a completely new concept,” says Edward Bran, product manager for connected solutions with Emerson’s Appleton subsidiary. “It has been rapidly adopted in commercial buildings, where it captures valuable insights into energy usage and enables users to make real-time adjustments to lighting levels, while gathering actionable data on occupancy, humidity and temperature.”
Industrial users have been slower to add such systems, though, Bran says, because the harsh – and potentially explosive – conditions in these settings have made developing suitable products challenging. However, newer offerings are addressing these hurdles.
One quality specifiers should consider when evaluating new lighting options is the kind of network the equipment uses. Compatibility with other facility equipment (so they can share the same networking solution) and extendibility (so new devices can be added easily) can be important attributes to ensure the new lighting system doesn’t become problematic over time.
WirelessHART is a networking protocol that’s become common in industrial settings over the last decade or so. It enables plant operators to track sensors, controllers and other devices, plantwide. It’s also designed as a mesh network, which means each of those devices also acts as an additional transmitter, helping to communicate data from sources farther out on the network back to system gateways. This contrasts with hub-and-spoke approaches, in which each device is individually responsible for beaming its data directly back to the gateway. With hub-and-spoke networks, distance from that gateway can become a problem as systems expand.
Looking for WirelessHART-compatible lighting fixtures can make sense for a couple reasons. First, it can save the need for a separate, lighting-dedicated monitoring and control system in settings where the protocol is already in place. The luminaires can simply become just new devices on the existing network. Second, the fixtures can help make the current network stronger. Their added numbers boost the mesh configuration’s resilience, with more receiving and transmitting points to pick up the slack should one of the other network nodes go down. And, because they have direct power connections, they can help take some of the load off remote sensors and controllers that might depend on batteries as a power source.
“Connected lighting is not a completely new concept,” says Edward Bran, product manager for connected solutions with Emerson’s Appleton subsidiary. “It has been rapidly adopted in commercial buildings, where it captures valuable insights into energy usage and enables users to make real-time adjustments to lighting levels, while gathering actionable data on occupancy, humidity and temperature.”
Industrial users have been slower to add such systems, though, Bran says, because the harsh – and potentially explosive – conditions in these settings have made developing suitable products challenging. However, newer offerings are addressing these hurdles.
One quality specifiers should consider when evaluating new lighting options is the kind of network the equipment uses. Compatibility with other facility equipment (so they can share the same networking solution) and extendibility (so new devices can be added easily) can be important attributes to ensure the new lighting system doesn’t become problematic over time.
WirelessHART is a networking protocol that’s become common in industrial settings over the last decade or so. It enables plant operators to track sensors, controllers and other devices, plantwide. It’s also designed as a mesh network, which means each of those devices also acts as an additional transmitter, helping to communicate data from sources farther out on the network back to system gateways. This contrasts with hub-and-spoke approaches, in which each device is individually responsible for beaming its data directly back to the gateway. With hub-and-spoke networks, distance from that gateway can become a problem as systems expand.
Looking for WirelessHART-compatible lighting fixtures can make sense for a couple reasons. First, it can save the need for a separate, lighting-dedicated monitoring and control system in settings where the protocol is already in place. The luminaires can simply become just new devices on the existing network. Second, the fixtures can help make the current network stronger. Their added numbers boost the mesh configuration’s resilience, with more receiving and transmitting points to pick up the slack should one of the other network nodes go down. And, because they have direct power connections, they can help take some of the load off remote sensors and controllers that might depend on batteries as a power source.
Photo courtesy of Appleton
