Background
John Crane, a global leader in rotating equipment solutions, supplying engineered technologies and services to process industries, have launched the John Crane Sense® Turbo, a first-tomarket dry gas seal digital diagnostics solution to monitor conditions at the heart of the compressor.
The Turbo solution consists of sensors embedded into a dry gas seal that monitor process conditions and seal health. By using John Crane Sense® apps, users can monitor the seal from anywhere and receive alerts about process upsets or other operational irregularities. This allows you to respond immediately before manageable issues become more significant failures that require downtime.
It also ensures you’re getting the most out of your equipment. Traditional forms of seal monitoring provide some information, but they don’t give a complete picture or sufficient indication of a seal’s health. Understanding health is critical to shorten the duration of an unplanned shutdown. Knowing a seal is healthy can enable you to defer replacement, saving on both equipment cost and downtime.
Problem
There are maximum EIRP (Effective Isotropic Radiated Power) levels allowed in hazardous areas. This affects the deployment of hazardous area wireless devices.
To see the full safe RF limits tables, please refer to IEC 60079-0.
Ignition from RF alone is rare compared with ignition from electrical faults. This is because the RF of hazardous area wireless devices is not the main risk. The risk is that RF induced in plant
structures can act in the same way as an antenna, with the subsequent energy having the capacity to spark at ignitioncapable levels.
To ensure real time data collection of the Sense® platform, John Crane needed an RF isolation solution as part of their hazardous area wireless gateway. The gateway communicates directly with the John Crane Sense® Turbo to offload data to the cloud and Sense® Apps.
Solution
Extronics iSOLATE technology offers OEMs’ a high quality and extremely competitive RF isolation solution. Providing intrinsically safe RF outputs, John Crane can deliver a wireless solution compliant to IEC 60079 directives. Extronics worked with its local partner, Exloc Instruments to support this project.
About Extronics iSOLATE Galvanic RF Isolation
The iSOLATE501 is an ATEX, IECEx, and MET approved RF galvanic isolator for use in Zones 0, 1, 2/22 and mining applications. The iSOLATE501 is designed to be used with Zone 1/ Division 1 explosion proof enclosures to ensure standard radio devices are intrinsically safe. The iSOLATE501 is small and lightweight making it ideal for inclusion in a variety of different applications.
The iSOLATE-CT is an explosionproof RF connector transit for use in hazardous areas. The iSOLATE-CT works in conjunction with the iSOLATE501 to enable the use of standard antennas for improved performance in hazardous areas.
