Articles and News

Enardo offers safety and environmental control equipment for the oil and gas, petrochemical, wastewater, refining and other industries.

By Bill Lydon, Editor The ability to improve manufacturing operations is growing with the application of software that can leverage lower cost computing. More than 30 years ago, ULTRAMAX Corporation commercialized an interesting software product to optimize the operating performance of industrial processes. I recently caught up with the Founder and CEO to learn more about the product and their philosophy and perspective of industrial process optimization.

Endress+Hauser invests 40 million dollars in new plants in expanding its plants for flow, level and pressure measurement engineering in Greenwood, Indiana.

PCT Engineered Systems' (PCT) cooling capacity needed to be increased dramatically to meet business demands and the company was able to quickly and efficiently meet this challenge using Siemens controllers and drives.

Emerson will automate equipment and processes for two environmental projects at DC Water’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant in Washington, D.C.

Through automated, frequent measurements of zeta potential, the on-line system enables continuous monitoring of the coagulation processes used in the treatment of the water.

Investments in infrastructure in many part of the world caused continued demand for high power AC drives.

By Bill Lydon, Editor At the recent Honeywell User Group (HUG) 2013 conference, Honeywell announced new services under the Assurance 360 program for owners of Honeywell systems. The overall goal of these programs is a reduction of unplanned events, faster problem resolution, and better plant performance.

Spuntech Industries’ North Carolina plant has a Profibus network that runs seven PLCs with approximately 350 nodes. To help diagnose problems, Spuntech installed Trebing + Himstedt’s TH LINK hardware and TH SCOPE diagnostic software.

The Littleton/Englewood Wastewater Treatment in Colorado had 35 gateway access points to monitor and troubleshoot all the instruments and processes within the Profibus network. They replaced the gateways with Trebing + Himstedt’s TH LINK devices.

Rotork flow control equipment has been installed at a sewage treatment works serving Somerset’s largest tourist resort on the south west coast of England.

By Bill Lydon, Editor The Honeywell system integrator initiative was launched in 2009 and has quickly become a solid program to serve small to midrange customers with Honeywell’s modular systems. There are 200 system integrators in the program with 55 of them located in the United States.

By Bill Lydon, Editor Metropolitan Solutions, a showcase created by Deutsche Messe and run concurrently with the 2013 Hannover Messe, provided a focal point for learning about the application of technology to improve cities. Real-time automation and control technologies are the logical building blocks for cities to modernize, improve safety and reliability, and provide efficient environments for people to live.

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.

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.

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

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.

By Bill Lydon, Editor In February 2013, Schneider Electric announced the PlantStruxure PES (Process Expert System) as, “The innovative Process Automation System that brings together the best from the PLC/SCADA and DCS worlds and combines this with integrated energy management features…” To gain a better understanding, I had the opportunity to ask their Product Marketing Manager some questions about this new offering.

Amaco Automation will serve the oil and gas market with controls engineering and automation services.

ITS will upgrade nine Siemens S5 PLC Water Distribution Systems with Siemens S7 equipment in the QAB and Formulation 1 plants at AstraZeneca’s Macclesfield site in the UK.