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ON World’s 2012 survey shows continued growth and new opportunities for wireless sensors Despite a challenging economy, the industrial Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) market has doubled over the past two years. A recently completed ON World survey of 216 industrial automation professionals, in collaboration with ISA, HART Communication Foundation (HCF), and the Wireless Industrial Networking [...]
Human Machine Interface (HMI) has evolved significantly from the days in which operations staff had to sit in front of a single screen to monitor a machine or a process. HMI/SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) applications now not only monitor and help control equipment and processes but also provide a huge range of information [...]
There has been much advancement in recent years in hardware and software technologies that are enabling more choices in instrumentation that can be put into the field and data that can be brought back to the control room. However, this equipment only provides you with data. This data must be interpreted into practical information in [...]
Since I was young, I can clearly remember how much I enjoyed imagining a world with technology everywhere making my life as easy as possible. To create such a place, I spent hours throughout most of my childhood building mini robots from pieces of my oldest toys, the main components of which were DC motors [...]
Good customer service must go beyond answering questions via some means of tech support, either in person or online, and include helping users maximize the benefits from the products they buy. Excellent service starts with having a human answer support calls instead of forcing a customer to navigate his or her way through a phone [...]
Carty writes in InTech’s “The Final Say”: Prior to starting my business, I worked for an automation products distributor for 11 years and made some radical job changes within that company. I started out in a technical position (automation specialist), and after four years I took a position as operations manager. Then a few years [...]
Common strategies for reliability Selecting the right asset management strategy is a balancing act between implementation cost and expected reliability. Reactive maintenance represents the most costly and least reliable maintenance program. For example, some essential assets may have a spare as part of a reactive maintenance program. A common practice is to run equipment to [...]
Functional safety within the process sector has always been a priority. As the process sector moved into the computer age, new issues arose as manufacturing plants converted to computer control to replace electrical, pneumatic, and electronic controls. The process sector developed a variety of tools to address these problems, but safety performance did not always [...]
Measuring the interface between two liquids in a tank presents unique challenges In other cases, an emulsion or “rag” layer will exist between the two liquids. Other interface situations include multiple interfaces between more than two products, or the interface between a liquid and a solid. In some cases, it may be necessary to measure [...]
Once a hacker has gained access to a moderately secured network, they can easily determine the IP addresses of every device on the network. Using port scans, they then can determine if the device communicates through HTTP, SNMP, Telnet, MODBUS, etc. Once the communications protocol has been established, the hacker will first attempt to determine [...]
