Articles and News

Wilkinson has over 14 years’ experience in the industry having worked for some of the world’s leading control systems manufacturers including Honeywell, Siemens and Rockwell Automation.

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.

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.

Orders totaled $385.89 million, up 5.7% from January but down 10.6% when compared with the total of $431.63 million reported for February 2012.

Bosch Rexroth won the award for its Open Core Engineering project, which unites the previously separate worlds of programmable logic controllers (PLC) and information technology (IT).

PLCopen and its members published PLCopen Safety Part 4 safety specification, specific to the application of presses.

PLC Checker website is a static code analyzer and collaborative cloud application, used to enhance the quality of PLC programs.

January U.S. manufacturing technology orders totaled $370.62 million, down 26.5% from December and down 12.2% reported in January 2012.

The Summit, being held June 24 - 27, will provide professionals with end user automation learning opportunities - from process and discrete to motion control and drives.

Crouzet will use Netbiter as a remote management solution for their Millenium 3 Smart PLCs, allowing users access to data on field equipment over the web.

By Bill Lydon, Editor I recently had the opportunity to talk with Blake Moret, Senior Vice President at Rockwell Automation. Other than their process control initiatives, we discussed networks, energy monitoring, embedded controllers, regenerative energy and their services business.

User Guidelines contain easy-to-understand application examples and show how to create user-derived function blocks to add to a company specific library, improving the reusability of the application programs.

Machine Control Group, an engineering focused solution provider, will represent B&R Automation in Missouri, Arkansas, and western Tennessee.

Lapauw uses eWON's Talk2M, an Internet-based remote maintenance and diagnostics service, to provide a secured VPN connection between the Lapauw service engineers and the PLC on the customer’s machinery.

Support includes Natural User Interface (NUI), cloud connectivity, Windows-to-Go, and Secure Boot functions of Windows 8.

Control Engineering, January 2013 By Jason Wright Box Canyon Dam, north of Spokane, Wash., upgraded its legacy controls with a PlantPAx system with two ControlLogix PACs on each of four turbine generators, FactoryTalk HMIs, and EtherNet/IP.

Iberdrola Renewables, the second-largest energy provider in North America, uses PC VUE SCADA system to monitor PLCs and 2,479 turbines at its U.S. wind farms.

ARC says the total PLC and PLC-based PACs market in Asia will exceed $6.4 billion in 2016.

Control Station's LOOP-PRO TUNER PID controller tuning software is integrated within the PlantPAx engineering workstation.

Automation.com, December 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor The Rockwell Software Studio 5000 unified engineering and design environment is a framework for engineering collaboration - the start of a new system architecture built on a SOA, "a bottom up build," that will evolve over the next few years.