This is one of those tips that you cannot appreciate until you have worked on a control system that did NOT have adequate messaging programmed in it. Operators want to know what is going on, and system messaging is usually their only clue. Imagine running a complex or dangerous process and not having any feedback [...]
At one time, I worked in a large continuous process plant that had alarms coming in constantly. The operators could hit the “Silence” button in their sleep. We had a case where a process flow was accidently diverted to the wrong tank, and it eventually filled and overflowed the tank. Even though the tank had [...]
Safety experts and ISA authors Bill Goble, Ed Marszal, Paul Gruhn will participate in a webinar on the latest safety instrumented system performance developments. The webinar, co-sponsored by ISA and hosted by Knovel, will be held Thursday, 16 May at 2 p.m. Eastern time and will cover the pros and cons of the following areas: • [...]
Over my career I cannot think of a single time when I regretted running spare cables or oversizing field junction boxes. However, I can think of too many instances where I ran out of room and/or capacity much sooner than I had expected, and wished I had run MORE spares. Concept: The incremental purchase cost [...]
We all know Murphy’s famous law, “If anything can go wrong, it will.” I have to believe that Murphy was an automation engineer because I have encountered his law in action on every project I have ever worked on. I have sat in HAZOPs where the group wanted to discount a scenario because it involved [...]
This tip seems obvious, yet some of the biggest project failures I have witnessed were a result of the team not understanding the process, and programming what they thought was correct. The folly of this approach was usually not discovered until late in the project (possibly during start-up). At that point, recovery of the schedule [...]
The expression “You get what you paid for” definitely applies to instrumentation. Automation is expensive, but the payback is there when it is executed correctly. Unfortunately, many engineers try to save a couple of bucks and go with the untested “bargain brand” and often pay a wicked price for it. Some instruments are cheap for [...]
Winner of ISA’s prestigious ISA Life Achievement Award in 2010 and many times recognized and awarded for his achievements during the course of his career, Greg McMillan is ISA’s most prolific author. Greg cranks out at least one book—sometimes two—a year, has written several articles for InTech and other magazines, and just completed the third [...]
As Hunter Vegas and I got into being mentors, we recognized what an overwhelming experience it must be for a new engineer to come up to speed, especially since mentoring within a company is becoming scarce due to retirements and burgeoning workloads and procedural requirements. We realized there was a need for a very succinct [...]
Automation Made Easy: Everything You Wanted to Know about Automation and Need to Ask by Peter G. Martin, Ph.D., and Gregory Hale provides a basic, functional understanding of industrial automation along with critical insights into essential terminology, new and leading technologies, and proper system application.
