RS485 Network Design and Maintenance in Food Processing Industry: A Winery Application

The communication networks are widely in use in every aspect of our life, making our environment compliable to the ever-present IoT oriented technocratic society. Good and quality communication enables reliable and representative data transportation service which provides interoperability of various data-processing systems. Majority of industrial processes have some sort of communication topologies used for interconnection of various subsystems, required by their specific operation principles, and often works in harsh and electrically and mechanically unpleasant environment. Presence of electromagnetic noises, electric discharges, strong and high alternating magnetic fields, mechanical and chemical stresses, also environmentally caused impacts on data transportation scheme, cause data corruption and lowers availability and reliability of such network. This paper deals with the problem of design, implementation and verification of RS485 based communication network for multi-nodal data exchange in winery cellars. The wine cellar represents exceptionally harsh environment in aspects of environmental chemical and electrical related conditions. The paper proposes optimal topology among multi-nodal communication devices for an experimental cellar setup, and develop communication protocol for efficient data exchange. Furthermore, a strategy for successful maintenance is also presented through in-protocol and nodal-oriented topology integration.