Articles and News

By Matt Rendall, Host of Drive Manufacturing Summit The convergence of advanced technology and manufacturing processes requires an organizational leader. Someone who will research, advise, and embrace on capability and process. This leader will emerge as the Chief Robotics Officer (CRO).

By Kent Lennartsson, Research Manager, Kvaser AB The use of CAN began in the automotive industry and has since branched out into a multitude of sectors, including industrial automation. However, CAN in itself is not equipped to handle the control processes needed for this complex industry. Instead, a secondary, higher layer protocol was required to make adoption possible.

By Bill Dehner, AutomationDirect.com A recent study by the Identity Theft Resource Center concluded that in 2016 U.S companies and government agencies were breached 1,093 times. That’s a new record and a 40% increase from the 780 breaches in 2015.

It may seem intimidating to sell to the government, but the opportunity is there if you are financially sound, well prepared, and persistent.

NEC 2002 defines an enclosure Type 4x as ideal for outdoor use and resistant to splashing water, windblown dust, hose directed water, and corrosion.

By Markus Brettschneider, ABB Food and Beverage This article explains how food plant managers can add a similar level of connectivity to retrofit most motors with smart sensors to bring their plants to the digital age.

By Jan Pingel & Matthew Burd, Honeywell Process Solutions One of the most important characteristics of a connected plant is the ability to increase and enhance collaboration to help solve previously unsolvable problems. The emergence of the cloud-based historian is a key component, therefore, to bringing the connected plant to life because it greatly enables this type of collaboration.

Powerful market forces are driving exciting changes in the use and design of laboratory automation and robotics.

By George Schuster, Rockwell Automation Many safety teams, in comparison, are stuck in the dark ages. That’s because they still rely on antiquated data-collection and reporting techniques. A Connected Enterprise provides an opportunity to close this disparity – and revolutionize industrial safety through the use of safety data.

By Jonathan Wilkins, EU Automation The combination of data from multiple platforms is now possible because of the OPC UA protocol - an in-demand feature - as the Internet of Things (IoT) gains traction. This article discusses how the open source protocol OPC UA is beneficial for automation.

By Cory Fogg, Automation.com Smaller manufacturers wishing to automate, may not have all the specialists they need on staff. With hiring processes taking days or weeks, the FactoryFix automated platform is working to connect these manufacturers with specialists in minutes

Real-time analytics enable manufacturers to make smarter, better, faster decisions to achieve greater productivity from existing equipment.

Using the Coriolis effect that causes a laterally vibrating tube to distort, a direct measurement of mass flow is obtainable using a Coriolis flowmeter.

Leveraging ISA standards during the industrial project design phase can enable companies to achieve sustainable benefits.

Level 1 DCS overview displays can help eliminate keyhole & tunneling effect some operators may experience from focusing on level 2, 3 & 4 control graphics.

By Katherine Brocklehurst, Belden IT and OT are very different organizations that have begun to converge very rapidly. This convergence has led to conflict, perhaps which has even been felt in your organization. This article addresses a major cause of their conflict and how to start resolving the growing pains.

By Marius Mützel, Kistler Group In the past, fiber-reinforced plastics (FRPs) were mainly used in the aerospace sector −but in response to the trend towards boosting efficiency and optimizing resources, their use in the automotive industry is now increasing as well. It is essential to use lightweight construction materials so as to achieve the increased efficiency levels required by law, and also to reduce CO2 emissions.

An improved cascade control structure with a modified Smith predictor is proposed for controlling open-loop unstable time delay processes.

By Alex West, IHS Markit Overall, a number of themes could be discerned at HANNOVER MESSE this year, including cost-cutting, production efficiency, downtime reduction, quicker time-to-market, product customization, and lower development costs.

An enhanced PID controller simplifies tuning and improves loop stability and reliability for loops dominated by discontinuous measurement updates.