Articles and News

Manufacturing IT Project Pitfalls (Part 2)

By Bill Lydon, Editor At the recent Manufacturing in America Symposium, hosted by Siemens and Electro-Matic, automation professionals from Ford and General Motors shared their perspectives on a number of automation issues including the lack of engineers, data connectivity, integrated safety, demands on global suppliers, and much more.

Manufacturing IT Project Pitfalls (Part 1)

The successful industrial manager has to have the skill and desire to manage clients, motivate and develop others, provide technical direction, ensure quality, keep the schedule, watch the budget, mit

By Pat Garrehy, Rootstock ERP software providers often confuse potential customers with cost comparisons relating to software license, implementation, ongoing maintenance, future enhancements and customizations between Cloud and On Premise solutions. The costs are actually about the same.

The commissioning and configuration of digital communications of a field-level network at an industrial operation, such as Foundation Fieldbus, is fundamental to obtaining certification of the digital

A simple method to find a robust output feedback controller by random search approach

Field analyzers enable a higher level of control, such as model predictive control, to improve product quality and process efficiency and capacity.

By Bill Lydon, Editor John Carey of BP Castrol challenged capital intensive industries that generally think they are impervious to change. Carey suggests that there is a great of chance for change and emphasized that it is important to consider how we need to adapt, change our behaviors, and organizations to compete.

By Robert Myles Given the issues present in large-scale PLC/DCS systems and the advantages offered by Dedicated Alarm Annunciators, the additional cost to include one as a redundant system is well outweighed; particularly when the system or the process they are protecting and the cost of a shutdown (or worse) is taken into account.

Development of a Virtual Linearizer for Correcting Transducer Static Nonlinearity

ISA Training and Education in April: Learn, Advance, Succeed

By Bill Lydon, Editor For a new project or existing systems replacement/migration, life cycles should be part of the analysis when making a decision to purchase a control & automation systems. Your company’s manufacturing competitiveness and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) are directly impacted by the supplier’s lifecycles of the automation products that you purchase.

By Bill Lydon, Editor At the recent opening ceremony for Eaton’s new building in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, I gained a better understanding of Eaton as a company and their commitment to developing products that meet world needs. The company has a very rational approach to applied research and development.

As a project manager, continuously monitor everything for signs of problems and immediately inquire if something seems amiss.

Improperly designed UPS in harsh working environments decreases operation continuity and increases the risk of expensive control system shutdowns.

There are many opportunities and some challenges for new engineers entering careers in industrial automation and manufacturing. A Q&A offers many insights.

Do not go with cheaper instrumentation unless you are certain the impact on maintenance and process performance is (and will continue to be) negligible.

By Mark Howard, Zettlex Nowhere is the trend towards non-contact sensing more evident than in position measurement. With such a bewildering array of options, it can be difficult to select the most appropriate instrument for a specific application.

Research details use of a pseudo-partial derivative (PPD) to dynamically linearize a nonlinear system, and aggregation is applied to the predicted PPD, resulting in a model-free adaptive predictive co