Application of Advantech Industrial Switches in Wind Power Generation

1. Background of wind power industry

With the increasing support from the government for the wind power industry, the wind power industry has developed rapidly. In 2007, 3,155 new wind turbines were installed in mainland China, with an installed capacity of 3.304 million KW. Compared with the 1.337 million KW of new installed capacity in 2006, the growth rate of new installed capacity in 2007 was 147.1%.

In 2007, there were 669 wind turbines in China, with an installed capacity of 590.6KW and 158 wind farms in 21 provinces and cities. Compared with the cumulative installed capacity of 259.9KW in 2006, the cumulative installed capacity growth rate in 2007 was 127.2%, achieving the goal set out in the National "Medium- and Long-Term Development Plan for Renewable Energy Law" three years ahead of schedule.

With the rapid growth of China's wind power market and the entry of new wind turbine manufacturers, the competition pattern of China's wind turbine supply market is quietly changing. Wind farm developers are more enthusiastic about investing in wind farms than ever before. China's wind power installed capacity will exceed people's expectations again and set a new record by the end of 2008! It is estimated that by the end of 2008, China's newly installed wind turbine capacity will reach 7.304 million kilowatts, and the cumulative installed capacity will reach 13.356 million kilowatts. The growth rate of newly installed capacity is expected to reach 111.71%.

The national goal of 30 million kilowatts of wind power installed capacity by 2020 is expected to be achieved in 2011. By 2020, China's wind power installed capacity is conservatively estimated to reach 80 million kilowatts.

With the large-scale construction of wind farms, wind farm information management systems and wind turbine remote monitoring systems are also widely used. These systems are used in harsh environments and require managed wide-temperature industrial Ethernet switches for network support. Recently, a large domestic wind turbine manufacturer selected Advantech EKI series switches as the backbone network switches for its wind farm management system.

2. The demand for network switches in the wind power sector

1. The application environment of wind power is harsh, with large temperature difference between day and night and severe wind and sand. The required working temperature is -45～75℃, storage temperature is -45～85℃, and storage humidity is 0%～95%, without condensation.

2. The electromagnetic environment of the motor control system is harsh, and the industrial switch needs to have strong anti-electromagnetic interference ability and a longer mean time between failures.

3. In order to ensure the reliability of communication, it is required to establish a redundant ring network with a short self-healing time. When the communication network fails, it can smoothly switch to the redundant backup line.

4. In order to ensure the security of remote monitoring data, the switch needs to have comprehensive network security settings.

After a comprehensive investigation, the customer finally selected Advantech's EKI-6554SI and EKI-4654R as the switch backbone equipment for the wind farm management system and wind turbine remote monitoring system network architecture.

3. Network architecture topology diagram

An Advantech managed redundant switch EKI-7554SI is installed at the base of each wind turbine, and connected via single-mode optical fiber to form a redundant ring network. At the same time, the EKI-7554SI in each ring network of the monitoring center is connected to the Advantech 24-port network managed redundant Gigabit Ethernet switch EKI-4654R through the electrical port. The internal server and engineer station of the monitoring center form a local area network system through the EKI-4654R.

4. Solution Analysis

Since the wind power industry has both universality and particularity, we mainly consider the following aspects in the networking solution:

1. The system design fully considers the system characteristics of multiple business subsystems, and adheres to the principle of giving equal importance to advancement, practicality, and mature reliability in technology, forming a complete set of fully functional networking solutions.

2. Able to meet the harsh physical environment, temperature, dustproof, electromagnetic compatibility and other requirements of wind farms

3. Due to the large scale of the network, the networking solution adopts a clear multi-layer structure, which simplifies the maintenance and management of the network from the most fundamental network structure design, realizes the rapid separation and clarification of fault points, and ensures the stable operation of the system.

4. The networking solution itself must have certain troubleshooting and rapid self-healing functions, be able to self-diagnose and quickly troubleshoot equipment failures and link failures, and generate real-time alarms.

5. When performing manual maintenance, capacity expansion, or fault repair on the network, the impact should be minimized, and maintenance and capacity expansion should have no impact on system operation; fault repair only has a certain impact on the connection terminals of related network equipment.

6. Network equipment should be industrial grade equipment with high real-time performance and stability.

7. The networking solution must be compatible, able to seamlessly connect network devices from different manufacturers, and have a high cost-performance ratio.

Taking into account the real-time requirements of industrial sites, a ring network design concept is adopted to avoid the impact of a single link failure on the network.

5. Advantages of Advantech’s Solution

Advantech's industrial Ethernet switches have the following advantages:

1. Fast redundancy

Advantech's industrial Ethernet products can form a fast redundant network. Using Advantech's original X-Ring protocol, you can build a reliable industrial network with an ultra-fast self-healing time of less than 10 milliseconds.

Commercial products can also form redundant networks, but the STP protocol needs to be activated, so the redundancy time will reach 10~30 seconds or more, so it cannot be used in industrial environments.

2. Anti-interference—suitable for harsh environments

Advantech's Ethernet products can work in harsh electromagnetic environments and have a high level of protection against lightning, fast pulse groups, static electricity, etc. at the data port, which is not available in commercial products.

3. Good temperature characteristics & installation flexibility

Good temperature characteristics, Advantech's EKI series switches are designed for a wide temperature range. Operating temperature: -45 ~ 75℃ Storage temperature: -45 ~ 85℃, meeting the stability requirements in harsh weather environments.

The installation method is more flexible. Industrial-grade products can support multiple installation methods such as rail installation, panel installation, stacking installation and cabinet installation.

4. Power supply advantages & installation advantages

The power supply is the root of any product. Among all product failures, power failure accounts for more than 35%. Therefore, in order to avoid the trouble caused by power failure, industrial products generally choose a dual power supply mode. And use DC power supply. Commercial products generally use a single AC power supply.

5. Security Advantages

Advantech Industrial Ethernet switches take the following measures to ensure the safety of industrial networks:

1) VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) Technology

VLAN is an essential function of security switches. VLAN may span one or more switches, regardless of their physical location, and devices communicate as if they were on the same network. VLAN can isolate broadcast domains on switches, it can divide the network into independent areas, and can control whether these areas can communicate.

2) IP/MAC and port binding

Setting the binding function of IP/MAC address and port can restrict users' unauthorized network access.

3) Traffic control function

The flow control of the switch can prevent abnormal load on the switch bandwidth caused by excessive traffic of broadcast packets, multicast packets and unicast packets with incorrect destination addresses, and can improve the overall efficiency of the system and maintain safe and stable network operation.

In addition, Advantech switches can also provide bidirectional (in/out) restriction functions for each port.

4) ACL (Access Control List) Technology

Advantech switches use access control lists (ACLs) to implement the security functions of packet filtering firewalls and enhance security prevention capabilities. Access control filtering measures can be implemented based on source/destination IP, TCP/UDP ports, etc. ACLs can not only allow network administrators to formulate network policies and allow or deny individual users or specific data flows, but can also be used to strengthen network security shielding, thereby ensuring network security to a greater extent.

5) IEEE802.1x authentication mechanism

The LAN access control protocol of the IEEE 802 protocol suite is a port-based access control protocol. It can provide a means of authenticating and authorizing users connected to the LAN based on the advantages of the IEEE 802 LAN, thereby achieving the purpose of accepting access from legitimate users, rejecting access from unauthorized users, and protecting network security.

6) QoS Mechanism

Advantech's industrial Ethernet switches use IEEE802.p QoS CoS/TOS/DSCP priority strategies to ensure real-time and reliable transmission of critical data.

7) SysLog (system log)

The switch's Syslog function can transmit information such as system errors, system configuration, status changes, and periodic status reports to the log server. Network management personnel can use this information to understand the operating status of the equipment, discover problems early, and perform configuration settings and troubleshooting in a timely manner to ensure safe and stable network operation.

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