Controller Area Network Bus based Communication system for Thermal Power Plant

Thermal power plants form a very crucial part of our power system network as they are responsible for meeting most of the base load demand. Traditionally, SCADA and Programmable Logic Controllers have been used for monitoring and control of thermal power plants. It was observed that Controller Area Network(CAN) communication in vehicles required only a twisted pair cable setup that is 2 wires running universally across all the monitoring nodes. The CAN bus system proved to be a very robust mode of communication in vehicles. In this paper, a CAN bus based communication system for monitoring of thermal power plants is proposed. CAN Communication between the thermal power plant components and its control room is discussed in detail.