Case Study: Solar Thermal Power Technology Company achieves stable, resilient network transmission for Dunhuang solar thermal power station with Advantech

Hardware & Software Integrated Solution Provides Stable and Reliable Network Transmission for Dunhuang Solar Thermal Power Station

Solar Thermal Power Technology Company was building a large-scale molten-salt concentrated solar power plant in the remote Dunhuang desert and faced extreme temperatures, sandstorms, thousands of heliostats and the need for highly reliable, redundant network control to send real-time commands from the control room. Advantech was chosen to provide a hardware-and-software network solution using its EKI managed industrial switches (EKI-7656CI and EKI-9428G) and WebAccess/NMS network management software to meet those harsh-environment and remote-monitoring requirements.

Advantech implemented 180 EKI-7656CI switches in ring topologies feeding an EKI-9428G core switch and WebAccess/NMS for centralized, browser-based monitoring and control. The industrial-grade switches (−40°C to 75°C, IP30, IEC 61850-3/IEEE 1613) deliver Gigabit transmission, X-Ring Pro redundancy with sub-20 ms recovery, and 5-minute polling/active alarms, enabling reliable remote control of heliostats, fewer site inspections, faster fault isolation and continuous power generation — demonstrating measurable network stability and operational efficiency from Advantech’s solution.