New Features for Industrial Gas Flow Meters

The In-Flow Mass Flow Meters and Con­trollers by Bronkhorst High-Tech, The Nether­lands, are of rugged design accord­ing IP65 (dust- and water­proof). The instru­ments are avail­able for flow ranges from 0,05–1 mln/min up to 200–10000 m3n/h Air-equivalent.

In addi­tion to the option­al Atex approval for use in Cat­e­go­ry 3, Zone 2 haz­ardous areas, the In-Flow series can now be offered with FM approval for Class I, Divi­sion 2, which is an impor­tant fea­ture for the North Amer­i­can market.

Fur­ther­more Bronkhorst announces the avail­abil­i­ty of a Profinet field­bus inter­face on their indus­tri­al mass flow meters and con­trollers for gas­es (for this new field­bus the FM and Atex approvals are pend­ing). Profinet is said to be the “new stan­dard for indus­tri­al automa­tion”, offer­ing major sav­ings in con­fig­u­ra­tion and com­mis­sion­ing. The flex­i­ble archi­tec­ture of Profinet with its com­pre­hen­sive scope of func­tions enables inno­v­a­tive, flex­i­ble, and cost-sav­ing machine automa­tion: max­i­mum per­for­mance and pre­ci­sion, flex­i­ble address assign­ment and mod­u­lar design, fast com­mis­sion­ing thanks to open access and defined inter­faces and opti­mal diag­nos­tics of devices as well as the network.

Bronkhorst has many years of expe­ri­ence with field­bus com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Depend­ing on cus­tomer require­ments, their dig­i­tal flow meters and con­trollers can be equipped with one of the six avail­able field­bus inter­face options. The wide range of dig­i­tal meter­ing and con­trol devices is applied in many dif­fer­ent mar­kets, e.g. the food & bev­er­age, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and chem­i­cal indus­tries, glass and tool coat­ing process­es and in machin­ery for solar cell production.