Protecting Ethernet Connections in Industrial Environments

As Industrial Ethernet brings network connections into harsh environments, it’s essential to protect connectivity products from rugged conditions. 

The proliferation of digital information, the Internet of Things, and Ethernet into every facet of our lives means that network connections are in more places than ever before, including the factory floor. Industrial Ethernet is replacing many traditional fieldbus applications due to its inherent reliability, higher speeds, lower latency, increased distance, and improved scalability. Protocols like Ether-CAT, PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, and others are increasingly used for human-machine interfaces, programmable logic controllers, and motor controllers in industrial environments.

The widespread expansion of Ethernet means that more network connections than ever reside in harsh environments — whether it’s a factory floor, a locker room, or a mobile hospital unit — where connectivity components have the potential to be exposed to moisture, chemicals, higher temperatures, and other disruptive elements. When designing, specifying, and deploying networks for industrial environments, it is important to understand which features and industry standards offer the best protection for critical network connections and reliably transmit the vast amounts of data that today’s digital world demands.

Standards to Consider

A variety of standards provide application-independent requirements for balanced copper and fiber optic cable systems that support Ethernet-based data communications in harsher environments. The international standard ISO/IEC 24702, the British EN 50173-3 standard, and the US ANSI/TIA-1005 standard all incorporate the MICE method of classifying parameters, which stands for mechanical, ingress, climatic, and electromagnetic.

MICE classification includes three levels of harshness: Level 1 for commercial office environments, Level 2 for light industrial environments, and Level 3 for industrial environments. These key Ethernet standards are guided by specific parameters for a variety of characteristics that can exist in harsh environments, such as crush and impact in the mechanical category, particulate size and immersion in the ingress category, humidity and temperature in the climatic category, and electrostatic discharge and magnetic fields in the electromagnetic category. Measuring these characteristics may require specialized equipment.