Case Study will be published soon
Abstract
In Laxey, Iceland, Atlantic salmon are raised from eggs to market size fish in an environment as controlled and monitored as any pharmaceutical plant.
Laxey is a land-based salmon farm of unusual ambition. Where traditional salmon farming in open-water sea cages, Laxey raises them entirely in a sealed, climate-controlled facility on land, drawing on seawater pumped up through volcanic rock.
At full capacity, it will produce up to 36,000 metric tons of salmon a year—nearly the weight of the Titanic. Inside the facility, hundreds of valves manage the continuous movement of water, salt, air, and waste through a system of enormous tanks.
Oxygen levels, water chemistry, and waste are monitored and managed continuously via the EtherNet/IP communication protocol.
“Electromagnetic interference on fieldbus can affect every device on the line simultaneously” EtherNet/IP addresses this by design. Each device connects through its own port and is electrically decoupled from the others. An EMC defect on one device stays with that device. “If you have a problem, you see in which port the problem is immediately.” “Very fast to recover.” In a high-tech salmon farm, that recovery speed is not a technical detail; it’s the point.
In Aalborg, Denmark’s fourth-largest city, the municipal utility Aalborg Forsyning is upgrading its wastewater treatment infrastructure to comply with the EU’s revised Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, a regulation that mandates a new “fourth treatment stage” to remove pharmaceutical residues and other micropollutants that conventional treatment does not capture.
AUMA recently supplied ~ 180 actuators to the facility for a new installation phase. The system runs on EtherNet/IP. The pattern is similar to Laxey: a facility moving away from legacy infrastructure, adopting a new PLC platform—in this case Allen-Bradley—and specifying EtherNet/IP as the network that connects it all.
This case study highlights the value of upgrading traditional fieldbus networks to the EtherNet/IP industrial Ethernet protocol in both a salmon farm and a wastewater treatment plant.
Paper and presentation from the 2026 ODVA Industry Conference & 24th Annual Meeting, Vilamoura, Portugal
Christian Seiler, Product Management / AUMA