Nil

Honeywell PLC and DCS

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Hi, Can someone give me a glimpse of different PLCs and DCS available in Honeywell. Ex: In Siemens we have PLCs classified as 200, 1200, 300 ,400 and DCS as PCS7. Also if would be of great help if I can get a link to honeywell's PLC and DCS Cheers Nil

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Honeywell is VERY hostile towards system integrators. Prepare for virtually no third party support. Honeywell only wants you using their in house people. They also lock you out of a lot of things even when you bought it. Virtually all of their PLC's use some form of function block, but not IEC function block. Their DCS's are ridiculously overpriced (try $700K US for a basic system before adding IO). They mix HMI, PLC, and historian code. Difficult to separate them, and difficult to keep any semblance of separation of concerns. It's all based on either third party or consumer grade hardware. They advertise heavy use of redundancy partly because they use crappy hardware and try to overcome it by allowing it to fail. Licensing is very obnoxious. They charge per IO point rather than per PLC or something like that. And they charge it annually! There is NO comparison to Siemens. And I'm not even a Siemens fan.

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The stuff described above involves Honeywell's DCS, about which I can't comment; I've never been involved with the DCS side. In the US, Honeywell has nothing that they, nor I would consider a PLC. The instrument division does have what they call a hybrid controller, what others call a PAC (Process Automation Controller), the HC900. It's designed primarily for PID control, not high speed discrete control. It looks like a PLC - rack mounted power supply, controller, modular I/O. Ethernet for multiple rack comm. Native Modbus TCP master/slave with the flexibility of either factory Modbus mapping or custom mapping. Its I/O is as robust as any other I've encountered and more than some (good noise isolation on AI's) and better than some others (universal AI's for T/C, RTD, or 4-20). Software is function block, no ladder, no scripting. Function blocks include stuff like slidewire feedback actuator drives that's very handy, when that's what's installed. One time development software purchase, no annual licensing, free firmware updates on the web. The HMI panel uses software that populates the tag data base in the HMI from the controller configuration. It'll never do motion control or run a bottling line, but for thermal processing, it covers all the bases, which what it appears to be designed for.

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That's a shame. I remember working with their older stuff (Model 620 I think) and I remember thinking it was ahead of its time...very fast, very reliable, and easy to program.

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Changes over time. Honeywell now has a separate DCS line, the Experion LX, that is actually intended to be sold through distribution and supported and engineered by system integrators (SI); not Honeywell direct, like tightly-held Experion PKS DCS. The success that Emerson has with its DeltaV (vs Ovation) has probably brought about the changes. Because of the lack of information about the PKS, it's impossible to say determine exactly what the differences are, but it is interesting that the channels are diametrically opposite one another: PKS is strictly Honeywell direct engineering, Honeywell direct sales, Honeywell direct service. LX is SI engineering, distribution sales, SI service. Some distributors might be SI's, others not.

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