February 7, 2017 - NEXCOM NIO 200 ISA100.11a gateways build industrial wireless networks, helping production managers oversee manufacturing operations and activities across the plant. The NIO 200 series features ISA100.11a connectivity, hybrid mesh routing, the web-based network management tool of nCare, and explosion-proof, noise-immune designs.
These ISA100.11a gateways can form a trustworthy industrial wireless network to collect safety-critical data, sensor readings, and field instrument status for industries of energy, chemical, oil and gas, metal and mining, paper and pulp, and water and wastewater.
The NIO 200 series is designed from the ground up for data-critical process automation applications. With the ISA100.11a protocol stack verified by ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute (WCI), the NIO 200 series provides full compatibility with ISA100.11a compliant field instruments.
To enhance ISA100.11a connectivity, the NIO 200 series supports channel hopping, blacklisting, and mesh routing functions and can correctly pick up RF signals against interferences. In a noisy environment the NIO 200 series can change data paths to avoid and blacklist error-prone operating frequencies and therefore pull field data out of the device layer of an industrial wireless network. To move field data up to the communication layer of an industrial wireless network, the mesh routing is also supported to ensure quality Wi-Fi connections.
Taking advantage of NEXCOM NIO 200 series, users can deploy a distributed Wi-Fi network with steady and expandable coverage to track all critical process parameters in an acre-wide plant. The NIO 200 series comes with a web-based GUI tool, nCare, for network management. To facilitate provisioning and configuration efforts, nCare supports CAPWAP, LLDP, and SNMP network discovery protocols, and integrates Google Maps to show a holistic view of geo-locations and network topology NIO 200s. Furthermore, nCare provides expansion support for ISA100.11a network management and Device Type Manager (DTM) to enable device status monitoring of proprietary field instruments.
The NIO 200 series is under the certification according to the UL C1D2 and ATEX C1Z2 standards for use in fire- and explosion-risk location and undergone stringent testing based on IEC 60950-1 and IEC 61000 Level 4 standards to provide test-proven immunity to AC power surges, electrostatic discharge, and electrical fast transient (EFT). Moreover, these ISA100.11a gateways are IP67-rated and can survive temperature extremes from -40 to 75 degrees Celsius.