Articles and News

Emerson Process Management, a business of Emerson (NYSE:EMR), announced that the company has been awarded a contract to provide PlantWeb digital plant architecture and engineering support for the construction of multi-feedstock biodiesel refineries by BioSource America, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nova Biosource Fuels, Inc. (OTC: NVAO).

Alarm Analytics helps customers utilize industry standards-based alarm management, reporting and analysis within a familiar Microsoft Excel environment. Alarm Analytics provides users with 15 industry standard reports for quick presentation of KPIs such as alarm distribution, tag frequency/chattering, cross-correlations, operator response time and operator changes by interval.

Flowserve has received two awards from Frost & Sullivan honoring its market leadership in the pump sector. The two awards cite Flowserve's excellence in providing superior value to its customers and its global penetration in the oil and gas industry.

ICONICS was nominated for Microsoft Corp.’s Partner of the Year Award for Sales and Marketing in ISV/Software Solutions. Nominations were announced at the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

ICONICS receives two patents for technology used in MobileHMI wireless mobile Web telephony software and Pocket GENESIS, mobile Pocket PC industrial software, and DataWorX32 Data Aggregation and Redundancy technology.

ICONICS is celebrating 20 years of providing Web-enabled, OPC-based, HMI/SCADA Visualization and Manufacturing Intelligence software for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Invensys Process Systems has been awarded a project by Petrofac Facilities Management to enable migration of the aging Emerson Fisher Provox system on the Kittiwake production platform in the central North Sea to a new Foxboro I/A Series process control system. This is the second process control project awarded to Invensys by Petrofac in recent years.

Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) will implement I/A Series distributed control systems (DCS) from Foxboro for a hydro power generation and pumped storage automation upgrade project. Located at the 1,088-megawatt Takuan Hydro Power Station in Nantau County in central Taiwan, the new implementation will utilize the Foxboro high-speed mesh control network backbone to maximize system availability and reliability.

Dr. James Truchard gave the keynote address Oct. 16 at the National Science Foundation-sponsored Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems in Austin, Texas. This new government research area involves computer-based systems that exhibit a deeply integrated, real-time interaction between computer and physical components.

Opto 22 named Mark Engman President and CEO effective immediately. Engman succeeds his father, Opto 22 founder Robert (Bob) Engman, who will continue with the company in a consultative and advisory role.

WINA will join the Automation Federation as a charter member. WINA is a coalition of industrial end-user companies, technology suppliers, industry organizations, software developers, system integrators, and others interested in the advancement of wireless solutions for industry.

ISA's Executive Board voted today to provide a new member benefit of free downloadable ISA-developed standards. ISA Members will be able to download (in PDF form) any ISA standard for free as of January 1, 2007.

Emerson will be sponsoring speakers at several upcoming trade gatherings to educate the industry on the risks and issues associated with salvaged, remanufactured and surplus equipment. It will work with FM Approvals and others to spread the word that such equipment may not be entitled to bear the FM NRTL mark

Ethernet Direct is cooperating with KTS Optonics Co. Ltd., to set up Ethernet Direct Korea. KTS Optonics was established in 2001 as a fiber optic product supplier, and grown to be the leading supplier of fiber and networking products in Korea.

GE Fanuc signed a marketing agreement with SAP to jointly market GE Fanuc Production Management solutions and SAP applications, easing plant floor and enterprise integration. This relationship allows both companies to leverage each other’s strengths to meet the needs of customers in important Americas markets.

Devon Energy Corporation eas recognized for Innovation and Excellence in SCADA applications for Oil and Gas. The presentation was made during ISA Expo at the Control Microsystems booth.

To fulfill requirements for a wide variety of customers, Air Purity is achieved via incorporation of Oil-Free Rotary Screw, Oil-Less Scroll & Oil-Free Vortex Blower compressor technologies. Hitachi’s Air Technology Group Products are incorporated into many market applications such as medical, food & beverage, pharmaceutical, electronics, etc. With nearly 100 years of experience in air compression, Hitachi is able to provide the customer with proven, reliable and efficient options.

Thermo Electron will showcase its full complement of process control products in booth #1332 at the ISA Expo in Houston, Texas from October 17-19, 2006. At the ISA Expo, Thermo’s booth will feature process analyzers, air, gas and liquid flowmeters, density meters, and level sensors.

Verano expanded the worldwide distribution network for its security event management solution, Industrial Defender, with the addition of six new resellers in EMEA and Australia. New partners include ATGS in Russia, CSE-Uniserve in Australia, Emte Sistemas in Spain, Ferranti in Belgium, Qpit in the Netherlands and Vision Automation in Italy.

Siemens will display its Totally Integrated Automation in all levels from Process Analytics and Process Instrumentation to Process Control. Siemens will also showcase the PCS 7 integrated control & safety system platform that has been selected by several major oil & gas and chemical companies for both new and modernization projects.

KUKA has been selected by Dyco Inc. as its robotics supplier for its new robotic bulk palletizer system. Dyco will use the KUKA KR 180 PA palletizing robot fitted with head tooling in its robotic bulk palletizing system which will give manufacturers the flexibility to palletize multiple empty plastic bottles and bottle configurations with minimal downtime between change over.

Wonderware achieved certification from the Support Center Practices (SCP) certification program for the fourth consecutive year. Wonderware again met the SCP compliance requirements, as well as the SCP community benchmark average.

ISA's new standards committee that is working to adopt the generic device description language specified by IEC 61804 for device integration has released its first committee draft for ballot. The Electronic Device Description Language is used to create an Electronic Device Descriptions (EDD) file for intelligent devices to integrate these with control systems and portable tools.

The JTRS SDR development kit, jointly developed by Xilinx and ISR Technologies, is the industry’s first to support partial reconfiguration within the complete Software Communications Architecture (SCA). This makes it the first complete SCA development platform for developing, verifying and demonstrating any waveform on a SCA-enabled System-on-a-Chip (SoC) platform using partial reconfiguration in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). ORB express RT serves as the sole Object Request Broker (ORB) supported by the JTRS SDR Kit.

The US Patent Office issued seven patents to Sionex for devices used in the detection of industrial chemicals, explosives and chemical warfare agents. Sionex was founded in 2001 with technology exclusively licensed from The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory.

Atmel and Tendril will integrate and bundle Atmel’s AVR® Z-Link™ 802.15.4/ZigBee™ hardware solution and Tendril’s network operations platform software for WSCN – enabling customers to integrate and deploy the Atmel wireless networking platform with IP networks, PC/PDA-based applications and other aspects of enterprise computing systems.

ICS Triplex has chosen the Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety for its next generation of safety-rated, fault-tolerant control and safety systems. The Green Hills software allows ICS Triplex to design and deliver control systems that meet and exceed international safety standards.

RTA-OSEK RTOS has been integrated with the MULTI integrated development environment (IDE). Developers of automotive ECU software can now reduce their development time, produce code with fewer bugs and lower their production cost.

Intermec's Oct. 24 60-minute live webcast webinar covers Engine and Component Tracking: Logistics and Error Proofing with RFID. It will be conducted by Tech Center President Chuck Boyles, Bradford Beale of Comtrol and Intermec's Mike Fisher.

Junot Systems and Loftware have signed a letter of intent to integrate Loftware’s Loftware Print Server (LPS) application with SAP® R/3® and mySAP® using Junot Systems’ patented NLINK® product suite with its SAP-certified interfaces.