Siemens RUGGEDCOM brings control connectivity in harsh conditions such as substation automations. Image courtesy of Siemens RUGGEDCOM.

Society often takes the internet and connectivity for granted.

As engineers, however, we don’t always have that luxury. We need communication equipment to operate reliably in the harshest of conditions from electrical utilities, highways, oil and gas rigs to automated factories.

Bringing connectivity to these environments needs more survivability and customizability than the typical routers and hubs you see at your local Walmart. In harsh environments, communication backbones need to be created using products like Siemens’ RUGGEDCOM and the lessons that can be learned from their products, manufacturing and design processes.

Building Communication Backbones in Harsh Environments

“The harsh environments our products fit into are environments where temperatures range beyond that of the normal office computer,” said Jim Slinowsky, vice president of Product Management & Marketing at Siemens’ RUGGEDCOM. “Our products are rated from -40°C to 85°C (-40°F to 185°F). They also have a high immunity to electrical stresses like electrostatic discharge and physical stresses such as transportation shock or drop.”

As a result, RUGGEDCOM products are designed to work in conditions where it would be expensive or impractical to recreate the environment typical electronics operate in. You don’t need to heat or air condition these products, and if you put them in a shelter from rain and snow they are designed to operate reliably.

However, that doesn’t mean that RUGGEDCOM should be used exclusively in harsh conditions. Slinowsky explained that the mean time between failures (MTBF) for these products is calculated for these harsh conditions. However, if you use them in standard conditions then the design options that result in these MTBF calculations will deliver a longer product lifespan due to the large safety factor.

“We also see it borne out by the field demonstrated MTBF,” said Slinowsky. “We have calculations that show good MTBFs but our field demonstrated MTBFs are typically over a million hours which equates to 100 years. So they are very reliable products. We get confirmation of this from our customers that say they install the products and never touch them again, which is an amazing compliment in my mind.”

Current engineering mentality frowns upon the concept of “over-engineering.” However, there is something to be said about the advantages of installing a product once and forgetting about it. To make that possible engineers would benefit from designing their products with a larger safety factor?

How to Design and Test Equipment for Harsh Environments

When your equipment is used in harsh environments like an oil rig, it has to work well the first time. Image courtesy of Siemens RUGGEDCOM.

To ensure the safety factors of RUGGEDCOM’s products with respect to vibrations, falls, electrical interference and temperatures of a harsh environment, a great deal of planning and optimization goes into the design.

“It starts in the early stages of design, from component selection to the design itself,” said Mohamed Hamawi, Production Engineering manager at RUGGEDCOM. “We have many criteria that they have to meet for the product to withstand these requirements and specifications for our industries.”

This optimization comes in the form of both physical and virtual testing in a simulated environment. Hamawi explained that these tests and simulations are designed to ensure the product is not only manufacturable, but also able to meet standards, certifications and the product’s data sheet.

“We need to deliver all the communication fast, on-time and 100 percent reliable,” added Joerg Freitag, general manager at RUGGEDCOM. “To make sure we can sustain all these harsh environmental conditions, there is a lot of experimentation and testing needed. We invest a lot of money to make sure what we deliver and use is really able to survive the temperature shock and vibrations and whatever is needed. Our products are at their best when the environment around them is at its worst.”

Products undergo numerous tests, including:

Assembly and configuration
Temperature operational ability
Safety
Damage survival
- Drops
- Vibration
- Fire
- Electrical

“We have a unique lab in the factory where we use the HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Testing) and HASS (Highly Accelerated Stress Screening) tests to ensure that the product can operate in a harsh environment,” said Hamawi.

He explained that HALT is used early in the product’s design to optimize its survival and assess each product’s weak points. In this case, it is used to build up the product’s survival margins.

HASS, on the other hand, is a screening test used during production to ensure that a particular component will not fail in the long run. The goal of HASS is to find all the failures before any product reaches the customers’ hands.

Continual testing throughout a product’s life cycle is a valuable lesson. This gives the design team more data for future designs and ensures the products that go out to customers perform as advertised.

Though Hamawi acknowledges there will still be the odd product that reaches the customer dead-on-arrival, however, these instances are significantly reduced.

In fact, the most common error with the product is not that it doesn’t work or that the wrong custom product was built. Rather, it will be that the customers were sold or selected a product that is not optimal for their process.

With improved communication between the engineers, sales, and customers, this should be an easy problem to fix.

What Connectivity and Cybersecurity Does RUGGEDCOM offer?

RUGGEDCOM RX1500 switch/router and RS900G switch. Image courtesy of Siemens RUGGEDCOM.

When it comes to connectivity, there are two lessons to learn.

First, it is important to “play nice” with your competitors’ product lines. This might seem counter-intuitive until you realize that many operations have to deal with legacy code and equipment.

If you are not comfortable working with what the customer currently uses, you will not make your sale.

The RUGGEDCOM products are based on standard Ethernet, IP traffic, DMB serial and industrial protocols. As a result, they should be able to operate with any current PLC, SCADA and intranet setup.

“Although we are a part of Siemens, our products are used by various OEMS around the world,” explained Slinowsky. “There are those that want to connect various OEM products like Siemens PLC with another company’s PLC. Our products can tie those things together.”

The next lesson is that if you wish to make your products truly robust, they must be able to account for unforeseen incidents.

This is certainly true with respect to cybersecurity. You never know what bug or backdoor a hacker could use to infiltrate your device, but that doesn’t mean you stop looking.

In a harsh environment such as an oil and gas rig, or a nuclear power plant, these cybersecurity concerns become particularly serious. Its seems that every year we are hearing about a cyber-attack on one major corporation or another.

For RUGGEDCOM, this is a vital consideration.

“We have an extensive test process for cyber security,” assured Slinowsky. “Siemens takes cybersecurity very seriously, so our German colleagues put together a global product certification team to make sure any cybersecurity incidents are acted upon quickly and appropriately. All development teams within Siemens are also responsible to put new products through a series of cyber security tests, like hacking attempts, to make sure the products are robust.”

How to Manufacture for High Customizability

The Siemens RUGGEDCOM production facility. Image courtesy of Siemens RUGGEDCOM.

What makes RUGGEDCOM an interesting product from a manufacturing stand point is that the product still involves a significant amount of manual labour to produce.

“In our type of business where we offer many type of highly configurable products, it would be very costly and challenging to fully automate the assembly and test process”, said Hamawi. “This is especially true when you are interconnecting different type and size of cables and PCBAs (Printed Circuit Board Assemblies) where changeover will be significant.”

However, many other industries have managed to make their production fully automated despite the variability of their products. Take the automotive industry, for example. However, Hamawi notes that in this case the ROI (Return on Investment) makes sense.

“It all depends on the industry you are in,” clarified Hamawi. “For our type of product, you require the labor in order to assemble and test products with minimal changeover time. We have what is called semi-automation. We use different type of fixtures to simplify and error proof the assembly process and automated test software and equipment to reduce operator intervention whenever possible. So what we do is we follow lean manufacturing in-order to make the processes as optimized as possible by eliminating all type of waste.”

Yet another manufacturing lesson from RUGGEDCOM is to weigh the pros and cons of changing your current system. Ironically, even when your product is capitalizing on the trends of updating to Industry 4.0, as is the case with RUGGEDCOM, it may not be economical to make that update yourselves.

Many of the components used in RUGGEDCOM’s products are too fine, sensitive and numerous for automation by any affordable or feasible process.

As a result, RUGGENCOM focuses on optimizing the process for the labour team. Regular breaks are scheduled and tools and equipment are all optimized to limit fatigue and error. In other words, they focus on updating the process for the human machine.