Rajant and Acubis tackle Stanwell's OT constraints

Rajant Corporation, the pioneer of Kinetic Mesh wireless networks, and Acubis Technologies, a Kinetic Mesh Premier Partner (KMPP) in Australia, have delivered the first FE1 series BreadCrumbs - Rajant Peregrine and Hawk - to Stanwell, a government-owned utilities provider in southwest Queensland.

Stanwell was battling the ever-evolving data and application requirements of its OT network, which supports CCTV, access control, in-vehicle fleet management, and autonomous haulage and needed the additional throughput that Peregrine and Hawk provide.

Stanwell owns Tarong power stations, one of Queensland’s largest electricity-generating sites, and the stations receive coal from the Stanwell-owned Meandu Mine via a conveyor.

Meandu Mine currently has five working pits and is capable of supplying the adjacent Tarong Power Stations with up to 7mn tonnes of coal a year. When the mine was first established it was estimated that there was enough coal to supply the Tarong Power Stations for up to 25 years. However, in recent years, more economic coal has been discovered, providing a secure fuel source for many more years.

"Dependency on sustained operations and critical infrastructure security are paramount,” said Chris Acton, Acubis General Manager.

“Industrial conditions are harsh and towering ridges surround the mine. Running multiple applications, video streams, real-time data transfer, and edge devices required Rajant for unfailing networking with high throughput and low latency," he said. 

"The Peregrine and Hawk are robust and secure. Moreover, these BreadCrumb radio nodes can grow with the capacity needs for future applications and deliver cost-saving efficiencies to Stanwell’s thermal power production.”

According to Stanwell’s Manager of Business Improvement and Technology Julio Romani, the Meandu Technology Roadmap highlighted that establishing suitable networks and communications platforms was a prerequisite for Meandu to accelerate and realise the value provided by technology advances.

"The Rajant Peregrine & Hawk are an integral OT infrastructure component. These BreadCrumb nodes maximize the use of the fleet management system, enable telemetry and high precision GPS technologies, and provide connectivity for CCTV, environmental, and control systems that operate across our Rajant wireless network.”

Kinetic Mesh networks work autonomously to provide optimal connectivity across an organisation’s dynamic environment of fixed and mobile assets, delivering robust applications in real-time.

• Total Mobility Every node in a Kinetic Mesh network can act independently and with full routing capabilities, making it a true peer-to-peer network that is completely mobile-enabled.
• Proven Resiliency With no single point of failure and self-healing capabilities, Kinetic Mesh® networks guarantee uptime of your mission-critical applications.
• Maximum Bandwidth Utilisation Kinetic Mesh networks make use of all installed radios to dynamically route wireless and wired connections over the best available links.
  
• Rapid Scalability While traditional mesh networks degrade as nodes are added, Kinetic Mesh networks grow stronger with each additional node. Nodes also self-configure for easy spin-out.
  
• Extreme Ruggedness and Security Born from military and mining applications, its outdoor mesh network is proven to withstand the harshest conditions and support AES-CCMP and TKIP encryption with configurable per-hop, per-packet authentication.