Appliance Design - January 2009 - (Page 36)

ELECTRONICS Powerline Potential Fig. 1. Diagram of typical building automation installation with PLC. Networking to create energy management opportunities. by warren wong and jean-pierre fournier Warren Wong is senior marketing manager, Custom SoC Solutions Strategic Business Unit, NEC Electronics America, Santa Clara, Calif., and Jean-Pierre Fournier is president, Ariane Controls, Saint-Augustin, Quebec. 36 applianceDESIGN January 2009 magine a world where the skyrocketing demand for energy, driven by the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels and the rapid economic development of emerging economies, leads to frequent electrical brownouts and blackouts. Now imagine if local utilities could communicate with appliances in homes such as a water heater, air conditioner, clothes dryer, or dishwasher, and instruct each one to cycle down during high-demand periods. This can help minimize power demand across the grid and avoid blackouts. Or better yet, imagine load-management programs that automatically drive down consumer electrical bills by turning off appliances and lights during high-cost peak periods and reinstating them when electricity rates are lower. That’s the promise of powerline communications (PLC). By leveraging the vast electrical infrastructure already in place, PLC systems can use existing electrical lines rather than dedicated cabling to transmit data. The technology basically eliminates the high cost of installing net- I work cable by allowing devices to communicate with one another after being plugged into standard electrical outlets. The concept is hardly new. Utilities have used PLC since the early 20th century to remotely control equipment on the grid. Only recently, however, have designers looked to PLC as a suitable low-cost methodology to precisely and efficiently manage electrical usage in home and building automation applications. Early implementations of powerlinebased technology for control applications offered limited performance. Initial derivations of the technology, such as CEBus and X-10, supported data rates of less than 1 kbps. Moreover, utilities using powerline networks had to grapple with extensive interference and a great deal of noise. Fluctuations in powerline conditions, in addition to noise from motors and other sources, frequently disrupted or terminated transmission. Today’s PLC technologies use different methods to encode the information, including amplitude shift keying (ASK), www.applianceDESIGN.com http://www.appliancedesign.com

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Appliance Design - January 2009 Contents Editorial Shipments/Forecasts News Watch Supplier Spotlights Commercial Appliances Plastics & Parts Electronics Motors Design Marts Association Report: NAFEM Advertiser’s Index

Appliance Design - January 2009

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