Ethernet in hazardous locations

Ethernet in Hazardous Areas: Understanding the Opportunities for Process Automation

Industrial Ethernet is becoming increasingly important in the process industry, especially where plant availability, data transparency, and long-term investment security are critical. In hazardous areas, however, communication technology must meet specific requirements: it needs to be reliable, safe, highly available, and suitable for demanding industrial environments.

This whitepaper provides a technically grounded overview of why Ethernet has so far been used only to a limited extent in process automation, which challenges exist in hazardous areas, and why developments such as intrinsically safe Ethernet, APL, and 100BASE-TX-IS are paving the way for new automation architectures.

You will learn why Industrial Ethernet is relevant for connecting process plants to the Industrial Internet of Things, what role parallel data access plays in monitoring and optimization, and why plant operators should consider open, expandable, and redundancy-capable systems when planning future investments.

The whitepaper is aimed at decision-makers, planners, and technical specialists in the process industry who want to make their plants ready for future digitalization while keeping the specific requirements of hazardous areas firmly in view.

What You Can Expect from the Whitepaper

The whitepaper gives you a compact, technically sound overview of:

• the development of Ethernet from an IT standard to an industrial communication technology
• the specific requirements of process automation regarding determinism, availability, and robustness
• the challenges of using Ethernet in hazardous areas
• the importance of cable lengths, intrinsic safety, and redundancy in process plants
• the role of APL and 100BASE-TX-IS in future intrinsically safe Ethernet communication
• the advantages of Industrial Ethernet over conventional fieldbus systems
• the relevance of high bandwidth for IIoT, data analytics, and plant optimization
• the concept of parallel data access in the context of secure OT and IT networking
• possible network topologies such as line, ring, star, and tree structures
• redundancy concepts for highly available process automation
• the importance of open, future-proof I/O systems for retrofit projects and new plants