With oil fields often situated in remote and demanding environments where extreme variations in temperature, moisture and other environmental variables are an issue, installing the control and monitoring systems can be difficult. Oil fields often consist of hundreds of pumps spread over large geographic areas. Lufkin Automation has chosen the Westermo MRD-310 3G router to equip its SAM Well Manager product, an advanced technological solution for high-precision monitoring and control of rod-pumping wells. As reported on Engineer Live, being dedicated to harsh environments, MRD-310 is aimed to demonstrate significant cost savings in this application.
“The router provides support for the wide variety of mobile standards used globally and allows installations in practically the whole world. It also supports IPSec encrypted VPN tunnels which is a requirement for safety critical applications that use unsecure public networks such as the internet. Furthermore, the MRD-310 provides a serial interface and serial to IP conversion, which is necessary to connect to the controller. The routers are also developed for extreme environments and can operate in temperatures from -20°C to 60°C. Today, this application is installed in a number of pilot projects to demonstrate the potential for significant cost savings.”
