IoT-lab

We had an open lab day on Wednesday, 28th October 2022, at the LNU Magna building, Kalmar. On that day, we examined the most crucial thing in the industrial automation branch, i.e., the safety of the Industrial Systems.

We invited Martin Kling, a systems engineer at Fortinet company. The case study was performed on a steam boiler system. The boiler system is situated in the automation lab at LNU Maritime Engineering department, 2nd Floor, Magna building, Kalmar.
The steam boiler system schematic diagram is depicted in the diagram below. Fig. 2 shows the real steam boiler system in LNU.

This system produces energy by creating steam. This system contains numerous sensors to measure, for example, pressure and temperature at various parts of the boiler. The sensors in the boiler system are connected to the Programmable Logic Control (PLC) system.

Fig 1. A schematic diagram for a steam boiler

Fig 2. The steam boiler at Maritime Engineering Department LNU, Kalmar.

The boiler system is controlled by Modbus TCP/IP, which is commonly used as a communication protocol in the industry.
Martin Kling gave a short introduction to monitoring the system. He demonstrated how to read from and write to registers from the PLC system. We further examined the system by overwriting in one of the PLC registers. We utilized the Fortinet company switch (shown below) that was able to prevent penetration into PLC registers. By listening to the Modbus TCP/IP traffic, the switch could allow/deny various requests. For example, if a certain set point for a certain register was set, all deviating values to that register would be denied.

Fig 3. Fortinet devices used to control and monitor the system bus.

Fig 4. PLC system for the boiler.