• Perth City centre – Certified PROFIBUS Installer and Commissioning & Maintenance courses, week beginning 30th April 2012.
• Perth City Centre – Certified PROFIBUS Installer, Commissioning & Maintenance and Certified PROFIBUS Engineer courses, week beginning 7th May 2012.
• Melbourne City Centre – Certified PROFIBUS Installer, Commissioning & Maintenance and Certified PROFIBUS Engineer courses, week beginning 14th May 2012.
• Brisbane City Centre – Certified PROFIBUS Installer, Commissioning & Maintenance and Certified PROFIBUS Engineer courses, week beginning 21st May 2012.

Further details of the training and a downloadable registration form can be obtained from the PROFIBUS Association of Australia web site at the PAA web site.

Since 2007 Andy Verwer has been regularly working in conjunction with the Association delivering certified installer and engineer training across Australia. A total of 355 Certified Installers and 113 Certified Engineers have been trained across Australia and New Zealand under this collaborative venture.

The latest tour held in November covered Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane and saw 55 Installers and 17 Engineers successfully complete their certification.

Certain industries have identified these certified training courses as a key to achieving well designed and installed PROFIBUS systems. For example, the water supply industry within Australia has adopted the Certified PROFIBUS Installer as the minimum requirement for staff and contractors who work on PROFIBUS systems.

The mining industry in Australia has seen phenomenal growth over the past few years, again this industry has adopted the certified training as a way of ensuring the newly installed systems are reliable and provide features that allow rapid health checking and fault location. Commissioning and maintenance staff complete an additional day of trouble shooting and health checking training where they learn to use modern tools to check and diagnose problems on working networks. A one-day System Design course has been developed especially for engineers who are involved with the design and specification of automation and control systems. This additional course deals with the optimum design of networked control systems highlighting many of the common pitfalls that system designers should be aware of.

The plant supplies wheel sets for Vauxhall’s assembly line on a just-in-time sequenced schedule that is synchronized with Vauxhall’s production. In such a situation the reliable operation of the plant is paramount. The wheel and tyre plant is highly automated and has a number of PROFIBUS networks involved with plant control and operation. Previously, device and network failures have caused pauses in production that have been costly. The Voith engineers have undergone Certified PROFIBUS Training to learn the techniques for network health checking and rapid fault finding. However, Voith Industrial services ideally wanted a permanent monitoring system that gave pre-warning of impending failures before they cause a break down in production.

Verwer Training & Consultancy Ltd were asked to advise on how best to achieve the required goals and the result was the first UK installation of a COMbricks™ unit. After a short site survey, the COMbricks unit was fitted to the automated wheel balancing control system. The unit was set up to monitor two PROFIBUS networks and also to provide two-channel repeater functionality for one of the networks. Ethernet connection to Voith’s IT network now enables their engineers to obtain network status and health monitoring statistics directly from workstations anywhere within the facility. Further the COMbricks™ unit has been set up to automatically transmit emails to the automation engineer responsible for this plant.

This trial installation has been a great success, providing 24/7 monitoring and pre-warning should network performance deteriorate. For example any illegal, corrupted or repeated messages are automatically logged and an email issued to give warning of the failure.

Voith have now decided to extend the monitoring system by installing a second COMbricks™ unit to monitor four additional networks in the wheel & tyre assembly plant.

• Certified PROFIBUS Installer course: Monday 18th July 2011
• PROFIBUS Commissioning & Maintenance course: Tuesday 19th July 2011
• Certified PROFIBUS Engineer course: Tuesday 19th to Friday 22nd July 2011

Please note that the Certified Installer course is a pre requisite for all the other courses.

Please contact Charlotte Gear or Chris Nolan at Endress+Hauser UK. Email: charlotte.gear@uk.endress.com, Tel:+44(0)161 286 5000, Fax: +44(0)161 286 5093 at E+H to book a place. A downloadable booking form is available here – PROFIBUS-Courses-Booking-Form-0411.

This hands-on training day will show how you can use the new features that have been added to the ProfiTrace PROFIBUS troubleshooting tool:

• An OPC Server that allows ProfiTrace to be used as a component in your SCADA System to provide live network performance and health checking statistics, and
• A ComDTM driver which allows ProfiTrace to be used as a Class-2 master within your Asset Management System to allow PROFIBUS instruments and other devices to be set up.

In addition we will be demonstrating Procentec’s new concept in network monitoring: “ComBricks” – a modular repeater and gateway system with built-in ProfiTrace functionality accessible over Ethernet.

This low-cost, hands-on training day will take you through the basics of the technologies involved and give you the opportunity to try out the features on a real system. We will have four working PROFIBUS systems and eight laptops with ProfiTrace running so that you can try out the features and equipment yourself.

There is a small fee (just to cover administration refreshments, lunch and printed course notes). However, the fee will be refunded in full should you place an order with E+H or VTC for any of the hardware or software demonstrated.

Places can be booked through Charlotte Gear at E+H
Email: Charlotte.Gear@uk.endress.com,
Tel: 0161 286 5000
Fax: 0161 286 5093

OPC server capability

Allows Profitrace to act as an OPC server providing on-line diagnostics and network health statistics over your SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system. So you can now monitor and report the health of your network from a SCADA workstation.

ComDTM driver

ProfiTrace can now be used as the Class-2 master within your chosen FDT (Field Device Tool) package. This new driver can be used within your FieldCare or Pactware package to set up instruments and other devices on a live PROFIBUS network.

In order to show how these new features are configured and used, we are offering a low-cost one-day training course in conjunction with Endress+Hauser, Manchester.

Date: Thursday 27th January 2011

Cost: £49.00 to cover the cost of course administration, refreshments, lunch and printed course notes. Please note that the course fee will be fully refunded against an order placed with E+H or VTC for any of the hardware or software demonstrated ar the event.

Venue: Endress+Hauser Ltd, Floats Road, Manchester M23 9NF

To register a place contact Charlotte Gear at Endress+Hauser, Manchester with your company order number or credit card details.
Email: charlotte.gear@uk.endress.com
Tel: 0161 286 5000

Alternatively download the simple ProfiTrace-Booking-Form-1210.

You can also download the printable ProfiTrace training day E+H which has more details of the event.

This two-day event is totally focused on the users of PROFIBUS & PROFINET technology and incorporates a programme which includes in-depth technical presentations running along side practical workshops where you can learn the basics and get hands-on exposure to the tools and equipment used in real installations.

The multi-stream programme has proved to be an excelent format that can lead new Users through the basic technology to its use in real world industrial and process applications and at the same time provide experienced users with the latest developments and applications. An exhibition is also running in parallel to the conference providing the oportunity to talk to manufacturers, equipment suppliers, trainers and consultants.

One of the most important aspects is that the conference provides the opportunity to talk to others in the industry who have experience in using this technology. In my opinion there is no better way to get exposure to PROFIBUS and PROFINET technology and to quickly differentiate the realities from the marketing hype.

Follow this link to the conference web site for the conference programme and registration detals.

Practical Aspects of PROFIBUS & PROFINET in Factory Automation. Held at Siemens offices in Manchester on Tuesday 27th October.

Practical Aspects of PROFIBUS in Process. Held at the Hilton Strathclyde Hotel near Glasgow, Scotland on Thursday 29th October.

Practical Aspects of PROFIBUS & PROFINET in Factory Automation.
Preliminary outline for the day:

10:00 Introduction including PROFIBUS and PROFINET Update, Mark Freeman
10:20 Practical steps for a successful PROFIBUS Project, Derek Lane
11:00 Introduction to Profinet, Andy Verwer
11.40 Coffee
12.00 Using Industrial Ethernet Networks for PROFINET, Alan Bollard
12:40 Lunch
13:10 Commissioning & Maintenance – Fault finding demonstration, Andy Verwer
13:50 Coffee
14:05 Profinet Configuration including the integration of Profibus and Profisafe, Peter Brown
14:45 Summary and the next steps, Andy Verwer
15:00 Questions and Close

Practical Aspects of PROFIBUS in Process.
Preliminary outline for the day:

10:00 Introduction, Gareth Johnston
10:10 Profibus for Process Introduction, Gareth Johnston
10:30 Profibus components (Connectors – Linking devices – Hazardous areas), Mark Cargill
11:10 Coffee
11:30 Project design and management, Tony Grassby
12:10 Commissioning a Profibus segment – Demonstration, Mark McCormick
12:50 Lunch
13:50 PROFIBUS maintenance and fault-finding – Demonstration, Andy Verwer
14:30 Remote access to diagnostic information – Demonstration, Andy Smith
15:10 Diagnostic drilldown to CMMS – Demonstration, Gareth Johnston
15:50 Summary and Questions – Close, Gareth Johnston

Places can be booked through Ann Squirrell at The PROFIBUS Group.

The simulation runs on Windows XP and Vista and can be used to visualize the signals as they pass along the cable. You can also study reflections and see waht happens when the end of line terminator doesn’t match the cable characteristic impedance.

Go to the downloads page to find the application as a zipped installation file (only 5.5Mb). Unzip the files and run “setup” to install the application. There is no help file yet but it should be fairly obvious what the buttons do. Eventually we will update the application to allow stub lines and different cable characteristics to be used. In the mean time have a play and see what goes on inside the cable.