November , 2024

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.