Pre-Engineered Solutions in Phoenix Contact’s Product Portfolio

Summary

Though well known as a supplier of high-quality electrical connectivity products, Phoenix Contact’s product portfolio includes fully pre-engineered solutions that serve specific applications in a number of industries.  This portfolio has been developed by a dedicated global engineering team with extensive project experience. These types of pre-engineered products can simplify procurement, engineering, and integration on both greenfield and brownfield projects.  Additionally, such solutions can be custom developed for specific projects. They can address auxiliary, safety, and other applications when it’s not practical to extend the installed DCS or SCADA system.

From Parts to a Repeatable Engineered Solution

Phoenix Contact is known as a global electrical and automation equipment company with a focus on connections of all types: hard-wired, networked, and wireless.  Usually, Phoenix Contact equipment represents only a portion of equipment installed within in a plant control panel.  The company is best known for terminations, power supplies, and the like, so it’s not surprising that most people think of Phoenix Contact as a product-oriented company, as opposed to a provider of systems and solutions.

Yet the company’s large and rapidly growing product portfolio includes controllers, modems, wireless, Ethernet, and secure networking equipment.  In fact, everything required to build a system or solution can be created using Phoenix Contact equipment.  But company products usually get into industrial designs via their systems integrators, OEMs, or engineering firms such as EPCs.

This perception of Phoenix Contact as a “pieces and parts” company is not entirely correct.  The company has a dedicated global team of solutions engineers who help customers develop designs that consist of Phoenix Contact equipment.  As this group has worked with various customers over time, they have developed a portfolio of fully pre-engineered application solutions for the process industries that can be ordered by referencing a single part number or application.  

Many of these solutions are for applications that “fall in the cracks” of major projects and not implemented as part of a main automation contract.  Yet they support some crucial applications for operational safety, asset management, regulatory compliance, and completeness of plant design.

Developing Pre-engineered Solutions

The Phoenix Contact sales organization includes a small but global solution engineering team.  This is a group of application engineers who are trained across all the different company product technologies.  Engineered solutions begin as a customer inquiry for which the Phoenix Contact solution engineering team and the customer identify requirements and iteratively develop a repeatable and economical design.  Phoenix Contact will work to simplify specification, procurement, and documentation.  Depending upon the anticipated volume, this can include creating a unique part number for the solution with its own documentation, such as engineering drawings and startup guides. 

Solution engineering teams are part of Phoenix Contact country business units, but collaborate globally, so designs can support all major national and international regulatory requirements that apply to any project.

An Example Engineered Solution:  Remote Site Monitoring

Water utilities operate many small remote sites 24/7/365.  Larger utilities manage these sites remotely using large SCADA systems.   Smaller utilities often cannot afford the investment, training, and support costs of such a large SCADA infrastructure.  Yet their operations sites may be even more widely distributed, while their operation and maintenance staffs are small.  Inexpensive remote monitoring enables these utilities to operate more efficiently and utilize their scarce human resources more effectively.

The Phoenix Contact EAGLEi (“eagle eye”) solution is designed to add remote monitoring capability to small utility sites and do so in a manner that avoids the costs and complexity that small utilities can’t afford or manage.

The EAGLEi solution has been created through a partnership between Phoenix Contact USA and EAGLEi Data, LLC, a division of Control Systems 21 with decades of experience in water and wastewater system integration for small utilities. EAGLEi is a small RTU pre-engineered and pre-packaged in a field junction box.  Phoenix Contact provides the RTU enclosure, power supply, controller, I/O, secure network, and cellular modem. EAGLEi Data provides a hosted service for secure cloud data access, including web-based access and visualization.

The installation and startup process is therefore highly simplified and repeatable. In the field, technicians simply mount and power up the enclosure, and terminate the monitored signal wiring on the I/O modules.  The heart of the RTU is a Phoenix Contact compact controller paired with a secure LTE router.  The secure router connects to the data center via a cellular modem. Technicians can activate the cellular modem service by a single phone call.  This creates a new data center account (or expands an existing one) and creates an associated RTU access webpage, so the operating utility can then monitor the site from anywhere. Besides basic monitoring, alarms and messages can be sent via email or text message. As utilities add multiple sites the new RTUs are commissioned and provisioned with the same HMI. 

Other Pre-engineered Solutions

EAGLEi is designed for use in the United States, but other solutions meet the requirements of national regulations as well as vertical industry mandates from industry organizations such as NAMUR in Europe. 

Recommendations

• Plant owner-operators should consider pre-engineered solutions to improve safety or compliance with minimal added complexity.
• For capital projects, EPC firms and architect-engineers should evaluate where and how manufacturers such as Phoenix Contact can help to standardize, procure, and commission repeatable engineered systems, such as small RTUs and pump station monitors.
• Electrical OEM solutions may provide simpler and less costly routes to integrate plant auxiliary systems when these are not effectively addressed through a main automation contract (MAC).

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Keywords: Engineered Solution, Phoenix Contact, Project Engineering, RTU, ARC Advisory Group.