April 4, 2010 — Efacec, the largest provider of energy, engineering, and transportation solutions in Portugal, selected Moxa to provide crucial IEC-61850-3 Ethernet switches as part of an effort to modernize a 400 kV high voltage substation in Africa. Efacec found that Moxa’s PowerTrans PT-7728 series switches, which are specifically designed to operate reliably in electric utility substations, were ideal for the task.Efacec’s key selection criteria included reliable non-stop operations, strong EMI immunity, media fast redundancy, power redundancy, and a wide operating temperature range.
Moxa’s PowerTrans products feature TurboRing redundancy technology with 20 ms recovery time for up to 250-switch systems, and are IEC 61850-3 and IEEE1613 certified by KEMA, a respected independent laboratory for consulting, one-stop testing, and certification services in energy and utility markets.Efacec deployed the PT-7728 Ethernet switches in the transmission substation automation system to connect with protection relays and other intelligent electronic devices (IED) to form a ring topology that is highly self-healing in the event of a network failure. Additionally, several PT-7728 Ethernet switches connect to the local SCADA monitoring server and redundant substation central units, so system operators can efficiently monitor operations at field sites.
PT-7728 switches come with four Gigabit ports to power high bandwidth networks and provide the capacity necessary for a redundant ring uplink backbone, with a spare port available for uplink to the core switches. The modular rackmount design with rear cabling simplifies installation and maintenance.
About Moxa
Moxa manufactures a wide array of device networking products for industrial automation. Information about all Moxa products, which include embedded computers, Ethernet switches, wireless solutions, serial device servers, multiport serial boards, media converters, USB-to-serial converters, embedded device servers, video networking products, and active I/O solutions, is available on Moxa's corporate website.
