Articles and News

October 23, 2007 Las Vegas ISA will hold courses on batch control, enterprise integration, MES, safety, security, and Ethernet.

While the overall market remains strong, ARC says odds are we will not see the growth in the automation marketplace that we saw between 2005 and 2006.

Invensys Process Systems will supply a Foxboro I/A Series DCS system to TOTAL Bitumen to replace PLCs at its site in Preston, England.

The market was $3.2 billion in 2006 and is forecasted to be over $4.9 billion in 2011, according to a new ARC Advisory Group study.

Invensys will supply a Foxboro I/A Series DCS for a 3,600MW generating station being built in Jharsuguda district, Orissa state, India.

Copps Industries will streamline its batch manufacturing processes with a DEACOM ERP system, replacing its legacy DOS-based system.

The TRUNKSAFE brochure explains how it is not necessary to duplicate an entire fieldbus segment, duplicate the field instruments, nor have any special software at the DCS to achieve fieldbus redundancy.

Approved by the Fieldbus Foundation,TRUNKSAFE achieves fault-tolerance without duplicating every component and installing special software at the DCS.

The WBF North American Conference will have 25 technical presentations on automation topics including industrial wireless, mining in batch alarm records and the quest for the perfect batch.

Invensys is providing Foxboro I/A Series distributed control systems (DCS) for two new Husky Energy grassroots ethanol refineries in western Canada. Each of the two new plants will produce 130 million litres (34.3 million gallons) of ethanol annually, to be blended up to 10 percent into gasoline products.

Strong economic activity in Asia is spurring the growth of manufacturing, which in turn is propelling the growth of the automation market in the region. The Asian market for Distributed Control Systems (DCS) is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.0% over the next five years, according to a new ARC Advisory Group study.

Invensys will supply Foxboro distributed control systems (DCS), Triconex safety systems and fire & gas systems, and Foxboro instrumentation to Aker Kvaerner, Inc. for a new LNG receipt terminal being built near the Gulf Coast of Louisiana.

ABB won a $2 million order to upgrade the Control System at Australian Vinyls PVC resins plant located in Laverton, Victoria. The project will evolve the existing control systems to ABB's IndustrialIT System 800xA with Batch Manager and MOD AC460 controllers. Installation and commissioning is scheduled to be underway by January 2008.

Laplace Technologies is a global provider of advanced process control, engineering and instrumentation services. Based in Houston, Texas, Laplace specializes in process, DCS, PLC and fault-tolerant systems. MAVERICK Technologies is an engineering, systems integration and operational consulting firm.

An I/A Series DCS was installed at the recently constructed Cilacap Power Plant, a two-unit, 600-megawatt coal-fired generating plant located at Cilacap, on the south coast of central Java in Indonesia. The new plant is to date the largest coal-fired generating project imported to Indonesia from China.

Umetrics and Matrikon will combine Matrikon's ProcessMonitor products with Umetrics' SIMCA-P+ and SIMCA-Batch On-Line data analysis products for the seamless installation of Process Analytical Technology (PAT) solutions in the pharmaceutical market.

"Design Patterns for Flexible Manufacturing," by Dennis Brandl, documents effective rules that should be used when applying the ISA-88 standard to both batch manufacturing (called the S88 design pattern) and continuous and discrete manufacturing problems (called the NS88 design pattern for non-stop production).

Organon, one of the largest manufacturers of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) worldwide, has installed PAS-X MES software in their new API-powder processing production facility in Oss, The Netherlands. Organon uses PAS-X for recipe management, weighing and dispensing, shop floor management, electronic batch recording, and warehouse management.

Invensys will supply a mesh network-based Foxboro I/A Series distributed control system (DCS) to Plasco Energy Group for use in Plasco's Plasma Gasification Process (PGP). The DCS will provide process and facility control in the Plasco PGP, a non-incineration thermal decomposition process, which breaks down municipal solid waste (MSW) into simple components such as hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide.

The Distributed Control System (DCS) market experienced the strongest growth in a decade between 2004 and 2005, increasing at a rate of close to 9%. This strong growth is expected to continue through 2010, with the global market increasing at an average annual rate of almost 7%, according to the new ARC Advisory Group study, “Distributed Control System (DCS) Worldwide Outlook”