Articles and News

By Bill Lydon, Editor Manufacturing management and industry experts generally agree that further efficiency improvements require the integration of IT and OT. Users participating in Rockwell Automation Perspectives panel discussions, half of which had IT and business background rather than industrial automation, share perspectives from their integration journeys.

Fundamental to distillation column loop tuning is trust the operator, but verify the basics.

The Instrument Engineers Handbook (IEH) explains thermal level measurement. The simplest of these designs is where the sensor detects low level.

Comprehensive and practical instruction from our education opportunities gives you the knowledge that you can share with your team.

By Bill Lydon, Editor Cisco is furthering their penetration into industrial applications. The Cisco partner ecosystem now includes FANUC Robotics, GE, Panduit, Schneider Electric, and Rockwell Automation. Cisco unveiled digital solutions that promise to transform the operations of manufacturing, transportation, and oil-and-gas companies, and address the security challenges these industries face as they digitize.

A simple approach for addressing upsets by supplementing the PID’s feedback control with feed-forward action.

Atmospheric pressure (Patmospheric), absolute pressure (Pabsolute), and gauge pressure (Pgauge) have the following mathematical relationship.Pabsolute = Pgauge + Patmospheric

By Ian Brown, M.A.C. Solutions For the process industries, it is essential to manage change when making modifications to alarms and alarm systems. Management of Change (MoC) should therefore be a fundamental process within the alarm management lifecycle

By Brigg Patten Big data will either push the world and humanity toward perfection or damage the world through growing instability where those who control the algorithms hold the keys.

OPC UA created a more robust and flexible mechanism that works equally well on the factory floor with embedded devices as it does in the Enterprise with IT devices. This article is the first of two articles that explain that how OPC UA Device Discovery works.

Seek a suite of practical metrics in terms of key performance indicators that can have an impact on plant control system performance.

What are the risks of republishing content and what can you do to protect your site from concerns about a duplicate content search engine penalty?

By Bill Lydon, Editor The Ignition Community Conference 2015 introduced Ignition version 7.8, while highlighting some major MES features. Ignition MES modules seamlessly integrate with Ignition HMI/SCADA - all leveraging cross-platform compatibility, unlimited free clients, robust out-of-the-box SQL database support, and fast installation.

By Tony Paine, Kepware Technologies In order to seamlessly integrate industrial data into the Industrial Internet of Things, a new communications platform is needed.

The scientific and engineering community widely accepts the Systeme Internationale d'Unites (SI). Its base units are length, mass, moles, time, temperature, electric current, and light intensity.

By Tom Craven, RRAMAC Connected Systems Downtime is expensive to both equipment manufacturers and end-users, and amounts to losses greater than the costs of repair. Thanks to connected machines, manufacturers are beginning to leverage the power of “big data” to avoid failures and gather intimate knowledge about what causes failures in order to prevent breakdown and hemorrhaging costs.

By Gregory Wilcox, Rockwell Automation Hackers and malicious individuals are also targeting manufacturers and industrial operators. These industrial network breaches may not be making the evening news, but they certainly should serve as convincing evidence for organizations to make industrial security a top priority as they move toward a model of enterprise-wide connectivity and increased information-sharing.

Detection and identification of induction machine faults through the stator current signal.

By Robert Golightly, AspenTech The inside story of operational intelligence lies in rich visualization and analytics capabilities that improve production execution by enabling process manufacturers to quickly identify and resolve operational issues.

Despite this default status as the "go-to" solution for feedback control, some processes simply aren’t well-suited for PID control.