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Continuing with our Instrumentation 101 blog series, let's delve next into temperature monitoring for industrial fluid applications.  Virtually all automated processes are influenced by temperature, directly or indirectly, making temperature management critical for reliable process control.  In practical engineering, temperature monitoring typically serves three main purposes – safety, quality, and integrity – which makes it crucial for process engineers to fully understand the many variations and nuances involved with fluid temperature sensors. 

For this case study, we need to pack our bags and head to the airport!  As part of an infrastructure improvement initiative at a major northeastern airport, an industrial component distributor of ours received an invitation to quote parts to an equipment manufacturer who were themselves quoting to build new passenger boarding bridges for the project. 

Have you ever heard of “dry fog”? When we think of fog, we imagine the type of thick, wet fog that hugs the horizon on a cool winter morning – the type that brings traffic to a crawl and makes us late getting our kids to school. This type of fog coats everything it touches with water droplets, so we’d hardly call that “dry”. As it turns out, there’s a different type of fog made up of water molecules so small that they evaporate into the air without leaving any sign of moisture behind at all.

When we specify process instrumentation for level monitoring applications, we’re always wary of variances in the materials being measured that can skew the sensor’s accuracy.  This is because most sensors are calibrated to measure within a tight band of expected material properties such as viscosity, bulk density, or specific gravity, and any swings in these properties can lead to operational failures. 

Industrial procurement has come a long way over the past decade, combining all sorts of technologies and processes intended to reduce a company's risk when they seek out goods and services. This is especially true in high-tech industries where the risk of bad solutions can be infinitely compounded by bad vendors.  We encountered this exact problem on a recent project, where an electron beam welding company (our client) needed help in bidding on an aerospace contract opportunity for an end user. 

To most organizations, procurement is fundamentally a cost center.  While this is the traditional perspective, what if we were to lay out an alternative case in which procurement could be viewed as a profit center as well?  That's exactly what we're going to do in this article, from the specific perspective of industrial process instrumentation.  

Not long ago, we had only a vague idea of what the phrase ‘screen printing’ meant. We had a rough mental image of t-shirts and golf umbrellas printed with artistic company logos, but it was not until a recent project that we found out what industrial screen printing was all about first-hand. For this project, a new client introduced themselves as a manufacturer of advanced textile screen printing equipment, and asked for help solving a print quality concern they kept running into. As the client explained, the issue involved vacuum control and required a sensing solution to save them from the unexpected downtime and wasted prints their end-users were experiencing. At that, we knew we could help figure out a plan of attack and jumped into action.

This article kicks off our new Instrumentation 101 blog series, designed to help readers build up their familiarity with common process sensor types, their applications, and their key selection criteria, beginning with fluid pressure sensors.  

As the old saying goes, “no man is an island”, a phrase that describes how all individuals are interconnected, making up a collective greater than the sum of its parts.  In many ways, this line perfectly describes the industrial distribution ecosystem, a domain made up of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and customers that are inherently dependent on one another.  All of us in the industrial supply chain share scarce resources, are exposed to great mutual risk, and can only succeed when the group succeeds. 

Sometimes, even experts need help from their peers.  Fortunately in industrial automation fields, most of us are driven by serving our markets and clearing complex hurdles, naturally predisposing us all to linking arms when a collective challenge arises.  In early 2023, Whitman Controls was contacted by one of our instrumentation manufacturing peers to collaborate on a unique project involving hazardous gas analyzers used in the Oil & Gas industry.