Articles and News

The knowledge of individuals can be openly shared environment at an industrial plant or facility is inquisitive and friendly and egos take a back seat.

200 professionals in the power-generation industry attended the International Society of Automation’s (ISA’s) 56th Power Industry Division (POWID) Symposium held in Orlando, Florida, June 2-7.

RefreshEng converts any of Cincinnati's 2-OM family of centerless grinder machines to the same precision machining available on new grinders - but for an outlay that is some 60% lower than a new machine.

SmartFactoryKL demonstration plant, from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, uses CodeMeter as the security component for protecting the transport algorithms.

The Houston office will focus principally on ETAP Real-Time power management system solutions for the energy sector.

Rhino produces metallurgical and steam coal in a variety of basins throughout the United States, leases coal through its Elk Horn subsidiary, and owns oil and gas acreage in the Utica and Cana Woodford areas.

Efficient technology design is now the name of the game, and centrifugal pump suppliers now face a flood of new competition says IMS.

The Instrumentation Testing Association (ITA) and the International Society of Automation (ISA) are teaming up to co-promote the 2013 ISA Water/Wastewater and Automatic Controls (WWAC) Symposium.

Metso will supply a DNA control system and a pulp cooking process optimization solution for the Cellulose du Pin mill in Biganos, France.

SmartGlance provides connectors for accessing data from different manufacturing sources, including both Invensys and non-Invensys systems.

ISA technical symposia successes and spreading the word about ISA Automation Week 2013

Optima Group Consumer, a German manufacturer of coffee capsule filling stations, is using an IDS camera to check the quality of coffee packets.

By Mark Davidson, LNS Research Largely due to the misalignment of goals and objectives, a considerable number of organizations struggle to realize the full business value that manufacturing can generate. There are several steps all organizations that utilize manufacturing can take to properly and optimally align goals.

By Kevin L. Finnan The trend toward intelligent devices in remote SCADA installations would seem to put remote terminal units (RTUs) on the path to obsolescence. Instead, it illustrates the evolving value of RTUs in contemporary systems.

For the past several decades, most industries within the US market have been dominated by the use of PVC jacketed metallic conduits. In Europe, they use polyamide conduits and fittings. What's the difference?

AIT's GOIT (Graphical Operator Interface Terminal) series now runs Movicon 11 SCADA/HMI software.

Exele Alarm Management & Notification Software has been integrated with the Canary Labs Enterprise Historian product.

Application of management, operational & technical controls will reduce risks to industrial automation & control systems and will mitigate vulnerabilities.

In the test at NIST, MTConnect enabled a robot conversant in ROS-Industrial to load and unload parts into an MTConnect-conversant lathe for cutting, precisely when the machine tool was ready to perform the task.

Frost & Sullivan says the Global Machine Tools and Cutting Tools Market earned revenues of $15.72 billion in 2012 and estimates this to reach $21.18 billion in 2017.

After two years of double-digit growth, the world market for electro-mechanical and solid-state relays contracted by $125 million, or 3.6 percent, to approximately $3.35 billion in 2012.

By Pat Garrehy, Rootstock There is a general consensus that, by 2023, most of the installed MFG ERP systems will be Cloud-based. But, will they be multi-tenant or hosted? There are arguments for both.

The market for process I/O modules is mainly driven by two forces: an increasing need for intrinsically safe I/O modules and the increasing demand from the Middle East and the BRIC countries.

Beef producer in Kansas uses KEPServerEX software to help confirm that its meat automatically moves from the warehouse to the retail location without human intervention.

Emerson will supply control valves and valve actuators to help ensure the efficient and safe flow of natural gas at the Gorgon Project, one of the world’s largest natural gas projects.

Metso will supply 30 continuously-operating water-quality measuring stations to Vapo, a power complany in Finland.

DB SQL was embedded in Cow Master, a robotics system that feeds cows and manages animal healthcare, including automatic matching of cow feeding patterns and continuous management of feed concentration to stimulate the appetite of cows.

$372.50 million in orders were down 26.6% from March and down 12.6% when compared with the total of $426.44 million reported for April 2012.

By Thomas R. Cutler Curtiss Wright Controls in Shelby, NC used vimana to improve equipment utilization on a production cell with 4 high-end CNC-based Horizontal Milling machine tools by over 20% in just ten weeks.

The 16-page document covers 1200+ data acquisition and control, signal conditioning, and data communication products.

Construction company Urbanas will use the ERP to integrate all of its financial and project information, customer relationship management (CRM) tools and business analytics.

Dynamotive designs, commissions and upgrades systems of drives, controls and motors for industrial and marine applications and automotive test rigs.

IVC Video Systems are used in mining applications ranging from small quarries to one of the largest copper mines in the world.

1,000+ page resource guide covers proximity, photoelectric, and ultrasonic sensors, rotary encoders, positioning systems, inclination and acceleration sensors, AS-Interface products, identification system RFIDs, and logic control units.

IVC video systems are being used by Dupont Chemicals at their nylon plant in Bridge City, Texas to monitor a hazardous material incineration facility.

By Bill Lydon, Editor Over the last two years, Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) UK Petrochemicals has empowered users to create custom dashboards based on Excel spreadsheet data and calculations using software from Sabisu. The software enables people to organize their data around "Communities" related to areas of interest.

IVC video systems are used by several large natural gas producers to monitor a variety of facilities in their pipeline operations including pump stations, compressor stations, delivery terminals, and receiving terminals for an array of pre-refined crude and refined hydrocarbon products.

A water agency in Northern California purchased a number of IVC 25x pan-tilt-zoom cameras for primarily monitoring activity on or near the perimeter fence of a water treatment facility that was being constructed.

IVC’s software and cameras are helping a Nissan Motors Plant monitor and troubleshoot problems that develop in the assembly of their cars.

A three-way consortium comprising ABB Venezuela, ABB Canada and ABB Switzerland was awarded a contract to design, supply and install the unit control, protection and instrumentation systems for the largest dam in South America. ABB chose Industrial Video & Control for the CCTV component for the project.

In the competitive worldwide car market, manufacturers are always looking for ways to improve product quality and gain an edge on the competition. Even the robots in today’s highly automated assembly lines can make a mistake. That is why a major manufacturer decided to put some “eyes” on one of its body assembly lines. Using IVC IP video systems, this was done at a fraction of the cost of traditional machine vision systems.

A major US forest-products company recently built a new sawmill in Western Oregon. The flexibility and economy of IP video systems enabled the creation of a large, complex operation that can be operated with a small staff.

Considerations for Selecting A Controller- or Server-Based Batch Sequencer

By Bill Lydon, Editor The inaugural Haystack Connect event introduced a movement that has the potential to be the next big wave in building automation by fostering an entirely new open system in the industry that goes beyond open protocols to encompass system software.

GasSecure, Redline Communications and Purelink joined the PKS Advantage program for the OneWireless Network.

The increased cost of using individual fuses will be quickly recovered by the reduced time to troubleshoot and resolve field wiring problems. One or two instances of bringing production back on line w

Honda of America has committed $75,000 to support the SME Education Foundation’s PRIME program over the next three years.

More than 200 plant and refinery professionals responsible for maintaining leak detection and repair (LDAR) programs attended ISA’s 13th annual Fugitive Emissions-LDAR Symposium held 21-23 May 2013 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.

During the two-day event, many new sercos products from competing vendors were intensively tested with each other to insure users of interoperability of sercos products.

MCS is a Brazilian-based manufacturer and system integrator of standard and customized high performance motion controllers and complementary motion control components.