Can you run 2x H2-ECom 100 in one base

[AdchemElectrician]

Hi Guys,
Hope everything is going well.
I have been working on a plc setup in our refinery that had 8 separate CPU's talking to 15 different screens, As you can imagine as these plc's started to get more IO we have been having com's problems. To start with I Blew out the poll times to the screens, What I have done now is a amalgamated them into one plc which has one 205 base with a do more CPU and seven bases with EBC100s  and the main plc has a E-Com 100 which is how we communicate to the plc for programming and also how the c more screens communicate to the plc, What i can not find out is if I can install another ecom 100 to the main plc for additional communication capability's such that you can split some of the C-More screens off to talk to one ip address and the remaining to talk to the other ip address? The other reason for doing this is that I'm installing Citect Scada to the plant to look at a holistic view of entire plant and for further alarm capability's which will need a fair bit of bandwidth basically will doubling the signals out of plc.

I have attached a screen shot of the plc base.
Also previously when i have used the EBC100s I had built a completely separate network but due to this being so wide spread and purely due to cost we haven't done this. Do you think because of the CPU to EBC100 communication being so fast we would be better to work towards splitting this, could this be done by just using a different vlan?

[franji1]

Isolating the main Ethernet port for Ethernet I/O is good, especially if you have a ton of other devices communicating on that one port.  One ECOM100 should be enough, although adding a second one does add some extra bandwidth since each slot has a limit to how many backplane requests it gets per PLC scan.  The fact that you are going to possibly double your comm - isolate Ethernet I/O and adding a 2nd ECOM100 would definitely help.

Reducing PLC scan time also helps with comm throughput - anything 5ms or less should be fine, but if your program is huge and running ~20ms+, that is definitely a limitation of comm throughput.  If you are doing a ton of string manipulations - those can be CPU hogs - doing those across multiple PLC scans instead of every scan all the time time can help.