Articles and News

There are several methods for eliminating or controlling the proportional step and derivative kick in a PID output resulting from a change of setpoint.

By Bill Lydon, Editor Automation Fair 2015 was described as a showcase of the latest advances in manufacturing and industrial automation enabled by the convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT). Here are highlights of a few interesting Encompass Partner products.

By Moazzam Shamsi, Emerson Process Management The self-configuring capabilities of WirelessHART networks simplify the installation and configuration of WirelessHART field devices. This article walks through the steps required to successfully install and configure a WirelessHART network.

What Does Hydrostatic Head Mean?

By Brigg Patten Advanced robotics perform complex or difficult tasks so that workers can focus on strategic and operational functions and decision making.

By Jonathan Wilkins, European Automation Five years after the Stuxnet attack, all SCADA and PLC systems across the manufacturing industry are vulnerable, no matter how small.

Success in making an outsourcing selection depends on understanding one’s own internal strengths, weaknesses, and business requirements.

By Rob Honeycutt, co-founder, SafeRack Implementation of effective fall prevention and protection technologies can go a long way in improving worker safety.

Symbols in the post image are used to represent thermal and magnetic overload protection for electric motors.

By Bill Lydon, Editor IoT is pushing functionality to the cloud and into edge devices. Many automation suppliers emphasize how important IoT technologies are for manufacturing to remain competitive. These suppliers are far up the hype curve and very low on implementing IoT technologies in products. Specifically, most automation suppliers are not embedding IoT technology in controllers and sensors.

By Bill Lydon, Editor Efficiently achieving the vision of Industry 4.0, Industrial IoT and Smart Manufacturing will require the use of COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) technologies that are open architecture. In every industry there has been resistance to open systems until a majority of customers demand them from suppliers. The industrial automation industry still has a long way to go.

This article explores the biggest opportunities that exist in the global LV and MV switchgears market, and the changes that have opened these growth windows.

Simple and cost effective, vibration sensors measure the vibration in machinery bearings, helping to predict and forecast machine failure

By Alan Grau, Icon Labs Securing IoT devices is a complex task. OEMs can reduce development cost and time to market by utilizing a security framework that provides key security features. The cost, time and complexity of developing a solution from scratch, or of integrating disparate open source solutions, far outweighs the cost of using a commercial solution.

By Punya Prakash and David Zaucha, Texas Instruments To date, the implementations of EtherCAT slave node have largely been dominated by hardware intensive solutions used to perform on-the-fly real-time processing and synchronization. Recent advances in technology have created programmable system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices that offer very tangible equipment costs savings, versatility and longer life cycles to industrial systems users.

Promote process equipment mechanical integrity and risk mitigation using risk-based strategies for asset performance management.

By Bill Lydon, Editor The AWS IoT is service-oriented platform that leverages a plug-n-play Internet and cloud infrastructure to monitor and control devices while using big data to optimize. Developments like this are part of the shift in technology that is likely to change industrial automation systems by adding more value at lower cost.

By Joy Weiss, Dust Networks Wireless sensor networks must meet a high bar for smart, security and reliable wire-free operation over many years. These stringent requirements can be met with existing and emerging wireless mesh networks standards.

The PLC symbol represents a logically false condition for a discrete input. When power is present at the addressed terminal the instruction becomes logically false.

By Jonathan Wilkins, European Automation Bio fuel, Eco Obsolete Technology (EOT) and Regenerative braking are the top emerging environmental technologies to look out for.