The Design Requirements for Industrial Ethernet Switches

The Industrial Ethernet switch is designed to solve the problem that the general Ethernet equipment can not operate stably in the industrial environment and meet the actual use needs of the industrial field environment in view of the pain points that Industrial Ethernet is different from the traditional Ethernet. So what design does an industrial Ethernet switch need to adopt to meet the relevant requirements of national standards?

1. It is required that the Industrial Ethernet switch can adapt to a wide temperature range.

The temperature in industrial environments is usually extremely high, and high or low temperatures may occur. Therefore, the design of Industrial Ethernet switch should consider that it can work normally in a wide temperature range to adapt to different industrial application scenarios. For example, in outdoor scenarios such as oil pipelines, the temperature can reach below -30 ° C in winter, which requires the switch to operate normally at a working temperature of -40 ° C; In the production workshop of a steel refining plant, the temperature inside the cabinet can reach 60 ℃~70 ℃ during business operation, which requires the Industrial Switch to operate stably at a high temperature of 85 ℃.

2. Industrial switches are required to meet the requirements of IP (dustproof and waterproof) protection level.

Industrial switches typically used indoors or in cabinets need to meet a protection level of IP40 or above to avoid dust intrusion that may affect the service life of the equipment; Rain and water ingress may be encountered in outdoor, Rail Transit and other situations, which shall at least reach IP54 or above, and some scenarios shall reach IP65 or even IP67 protection capacity.

3. The Industrial Ethernet switch is required to meet the requirements of relevant mechanical adaptability, such as vibration, shock and drop.

4. The Industrial Ethernet switch is required to meet the requirements of relevant electromagnetic performance.

There are various sources of electromagnetic interference in the industrial environment, such as motors, high-voltage equipment, etc., which may cause interference and interruption to network communication. Therefore, Industrial Ethernet switches need to have good anti-interference capability to ensure stable data transmission and high-quality communication. In most rail transit scenarios, according to the requirements of EN50155, the EMC performance of switches mostly needs to meet level 3 requirements; In harsh power systems, especially substation network systems, the EMC performance of switches mostly needs to meet level 4 requirements.

5. The software function of Industrial Ethernet switch is required to meet the requirements of network redundancy.

In order to ensure the stability and reliability of the overall network in industrial networks, redundant network design is often considered during the network design phase, which requires industrial switches to support high-performance redundant protocols.

6. The software function of the industrial switch is required to meet the overall security requirements of the industrial network system.

As the foundation for various production and business operations, the security of the industrial network system is particularly important. The Industrial Ethernet switch shall provide powerful network security functions, including authentication, access control, data encryption and defense mechanisms, to protect the industrial network from unauthorized access and network attacks.

7. Multi ports and high-density design requirements:

The industrial environment usually needs to connect multiple devices and nodes. Therefore, the design of Industrial Ethernet switches requires multiple Ethernet ports to support large-scale device connection and communication. In addition, high-density port design can also reduce the space occupied by devices.

As an enterprise in the field of industrial control, Houshi has developed industrial switch products based on the characteristics of the industrial network environment mentioned above. Currently, it has launched a full line of industrial switch series products and is continuously developing and expanding its product line scale. The product design adopts industrial grade chips, resistors, capacitors, and power modules, with an internal fanless heat dissipation design method, providing a variety of product and interface forms, supporting various types of card rail, rack type, network management type, non network management type, and PoE power supply, covering network applications from access layer, aggregation layer to core layer, meeting the requirements of factory automation, petrochemical, municipal transportation, power The demand for most industrial network scenarios such as coal.