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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.

Most of us working in industrial fields are endlessly impressed by large scale fluid applications, especially those that seem too complex or massive to comprehend. Intercontinental pipelines, hydroelectric dams, and municipal water treatment plants are just a few examples that come to mind. As impressive as these monstrous systems can be, there's ample reason to be equally inspired by applications on the opposite end of the spectrum, where miniscule amounts of fluids can be pumped accurately down to a fraction of a raindrop in volume. These are referred to as metering or dosing pump applications, and are found throughout industrial processes where they inject, transfer, and blend fluids with extreme, infinitesimal precision. Along these same lines, a premium national manufacturer of metering pumps reached out to Whitman Controls looking to add pressure and vacuum protection to their line of dosing pump systems, which made us think of a new twist on an old phrase: "go small or go home!"

As with so many modern technology trends, the concept and the reality of cleantech are often two different things. There is ample discussion out in the world about the aspirations of cleantech, but not nearly enough detail on how cleantech principles can be directly applied in practice. This is particularly true in industrial automation and process control arenas, a fact that we here at Whitman Controls see firsthand. From our vantage point, we see ample potential for cleantech-inspired process automation developments in the years to come, starting with applying customized process instrumentation towards cleantech goals.

In industrial manufacturing and engineering circles, we hear the word 'quality' more often than we can count. There seems to be a universal interest in achieving high quality, but what exactly does 'quality' mean, and is it measuring the same metrics in every application? More specifically, what does the mention of 'quality management' mean for those of us in the industrial instrumentation world?

Most readers will have a mental concept of surface mining, with big excavators and dump trucks zipping about a pit dug into the Earth in search of valuable materials such as copper, gold, and diamonds. We thought we had a good understanding of what open-pit mining entailed as well, until we learned just how big the equipment used in these operations really is. Not long back, we received an inquiry from a returning client looking to address an automation challenge with their hydraulic test rigs – rigs that exclusively tested mining equipment hydraulics used in large open-pit mines. As the client described their test rigs and the mining vehicles they served, we realized that our mental image of mining equipment was way too small. Luckily, even such large equipment and the test rigs that keep them in tip-top operation still use normal sized instrumentation. With that, we turned our attention to the client’s concerns about protecting their test rigs from significant, hazardous high pressure situations, and dug right in.

A prospective client requested Whitman's review of a new application they were working on involving industrial adiabatic cooling technology, seeking an analysis and recommendation on control sensor solutions that could fit into a new product lineup they were developing.  "Sure, we'll help," we said, "that sounds pretty cool."  Pun completely intended!