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We recently upgraded an industrial facility’s Life Safety System (LSS) from Draeger Polytron XP Tox and Flame 2300 hardware to Drager Polytron 8000 and Flame 5000.  At the same time, we removed the 3 associated PLC’s and replaced them with Draeger’s’ new Regard 7000 rack-based system.  This system is integrated into a Siemens fire system and that integration was retained. 

The plant cannot operate without the LSS being functional, so we had scheduled for a plant shutdown from Friday to Sunday.  All of the removal and new installation work was finished by Saturday night with gas system testing done on Sunday.  This allowed the plant to operate again on Monday whilst the integration to the fire system was tested. 

The new platform provides state of the art functionality in terms of connectivity and diagnostics.  Field technicians can now attach their laptops anywhere in the plant and without a need to adjust their IP addresses.  The Regard 7000 racks utilize a proprietary ethernet protocol that does not require IP addressing.  It is possible to ‘tunnel’ through the IO racks and out to the Polytron 8000 transmitters in order to make adjustments or read diagnostic information. 

The Regard 7000 integrates immediately and completely with all Draeger Polytron devices over a HART connection and even integrates to competitive devices using a 4-20mA signal.  It supports relay outputs to drive horns and lights and digital inputs to support alarm acknowledge pushbuttons or inhibit switches. 

The Regard 7000 supports Modbus TCP slave, so a Samsara IG21 was added to the network to pull data from each of the gas detectors and display it via a cell connection to the cloud on mobile devices for plant management.  These are AES256 bit end-to-end encrypted connections that are also used to produce text, email and voice alerts when any gas level goes out of its standard range.  In addition, the IG21 allows for NSI to set up a secure VPN tunnel to diagnose any faults securely and remotely, thus providing lower cost and more timely support for our customer. 

The Flame 5000 is an explosion proof flame detector that is actually a video camera that uses advanced algorithms to ‘see’ a flame.  Welding, hot CO2 emissions and flare reflections do not trigger the alarms but it will detect an n-heptane fire of 0.1m2 at 44m separation.  It also supports full color video camera functionality and can record locally to an SD card for before and after event analysis.