MTL Hazardous Area Panel automatically running Half-Duplex

C

Thread Starter

Craig

Hey All,

Just over a week ago, our whole control system fellover in one of our factories. To make matters worse the area affected was a Hazardous one (alcohol distillation area).

As this is a hazardous area, we use an MTL io Panel to receive all the hazardous area signals.

http://www.mtl-inst.com/products/category/process_i_o

This MTL Panel (consisting of several digital input/output and Analog Input/Output) then sends the signals using MTL "BIM - Bus Interface Module" to our Ethernet switch, which in turn is connected to our IO Server etc etc.

The problem however is that for some reason the Ethernet signal being sent from the BIM is half-duplex and not full-duplex like every other signal.

I think this is causing a duplex mis-match or occasionally failing as the half-duplex speed is just not fast enough for our PLC scan rate.

Half-duplex is apparently very old technology, so I assume a newly purchased MTL BIM would be capable of full-duplex.

Does anyone have any idea how to configure the BIM to full duplex? I have tried forcing the switch to full-duplex but this causes the signal to disappear entirely - which I guess means that the BIM is not set to "auto-negotiate" but is in fact set to half-duplex.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, this fault must be repaired by Wednesday, to any help at all would be of great assistance.

Thanks in advance,
Craig
 
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