OEM Manufacturing

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. 

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.  

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. 

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! 

Tuesday mornings are arguably the best possible time of the week to be reminded of high school science terms we haven't thought about for too many decades.  Or at least for one Tuesday morning in particular, in which we received an email asking about our experience in gas control for interferometry propagation.  We'll save you a Wikipedia search - lasers; they were referring to lasers.  This email was from a leading CO2 fabrication laser manufacturer looking for assistance in solving a gas mixture delivery challenge for an upcoming continuous laser marking application