Issue Archive

Wireless Wisdom: What’s Your Strategy? Where’s Your Committee?
A Forum of Wireless Experts at ISA Expo 2008 Turns into a Cautionary Consensus About the Dangers of Falling in Love with Technologies and Applications That May Run Counter to Your Long-Term Wireless Strategy and Corporate Goals

Control 2009 Readers’ Choice Awards
Control Readers Report Their Solution Provider Preferences in More than 100 Process Automation Technology Categories

Making Analyzers that Work in the Real World
Why Can’t Someone Make an Analyzer That Works as Well and as Reliably as a Pressure, a Temperature or a Flow Transmitter?

Calibrating Injection Molding Machines, Compressor Control
Readers Asks About the Proper Procedure to Calibrate an Injection Molding Machine

Carry-Along Calibrators Create Convenience
Calibrating the Controllers and Other Instruments

Control System Migration
Reduce Costs and Risk by Following These Control System Migration Best Practices

Falling Commodity Prices: Bane or Boon?
Despite the Economic Slowdown, Investment in Production Capacity Has Not Kept Pace with Global Demand

Fieldbus on a Shoestring
Use the Wire You Have. Unless You’re Really Challenging the Limits of the Physical Layer, Ordinary Twisted/Shielded Pair Will Work Reliably

New Flow Calibration Facilities Are World’s Best
New Calibration Facility

If Machines Could Talk
How Does the Automation Industry Deal with Downtime Caused by Technology or Alarm Management Failure?

It’s 12 a.m. Do You Know What Your PID’s Doing?
The Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID)

Smart–Trak 2 Mass Flow Controllers Put Users in Control
Next Generation of High-Performance Digital Gas Mass Flow Meters

PLC Programming
The Three Top Reasons Why RLL - Ladder Logic - Remains the Control Language of Choice of PLC Users Worldwide Are - It's Easy to Learn, Robust to Use and Offers Transparency Across Platforms

PLCs, PACs and DCSs Can Do Windows
The Capability of Today’s PC-Based Industrial Computers Are Overcoming Engineers’ Resistance to “the Wal-Mart of Operating Systems.”

The Rubik’s Cube Challenge
Flowmeters Come in All Shapes and Sizes, and the Puzzle Solution Must Fit the Process.

New SIL–Conforming Safety Switch from Drexelbrook
Tank Farms Have Problems with Environmental Safety

Safety Trip Alarm Certified by TÜV for IEC 61508 Applications
Why Is Trust so Important?

Taking Drives for a Spin
This Month, We Discuss Industrial Drives

Randy Reiss’s Top 10 Broken New Year’s Resolutions
These Are Greg McMillan's and Stan Weiner's Most Broken Resolutions, Maybe 2009 Will Be Different

Voices of Experience
Some Users Ask Us for Transmitters with 0.10% Accuracy, and Then Buy a Sensor That’s Off by Up to 10 °F at Different Temperature Levels

So You Can’t Retire—Now What?
If Your 401K or Pension Plan Has Lost Its Value, Take a Look at Your Skills and Your Training. Now May Be the Time to Look at CAP or CCST Training

PDVSA Petropiar is HART Plant of the Year

Endress + Hauser Founder Dies

“Father of Control System Integration” Dies

“Don’t mention the products” says Invensys Process Systems as it promotes its integrated solutions strategy
IPS has been playing catch-up in trying to explain the strategic changes that it is intended to embody

Selling SCADA’s one thing; MES needs some marketing
“Independent” industrial automation software vendors may still exist

Rockwell hopes PlantPAx is greater than sum of parts
Industrial and geographical diversification has provided Rockwell with a cushion against the worst the global economy has thrown at it in recent months

Standard architecture for wireless sensing?
EnOcean is bidding to establish its newly launched Dolphin system architecture as a non-proprietary standard for building automation and industrial control

Kepware finds a partner for building automation
Kepware is partnering with German communications protocol specialist ConneXSoft to develop drivers for the building automation and energy management markets

Citect/Schneider in UK “headcount reduction”
Citect issues a new press release with an extended quote from Paul Hurst

Profibus PA enhancements win NAMUR approval
Innovations to be included in the forthcoming new version of the process automation oriented fieldbus protocol Profibus PA have been given the seal of approval by the fieldbus working group of NAMUR

NI in Supercomputing Finals
The benchmarks achieved included distributing control algorithms on up to eight cores simultaneously and performing a 3,000-by-6,000 matrix-vector multiplication within 0.5ms

OPC UA from user perspective
“OPC UA: An End User’s Perspective” addresses many of the questions and concerns which engineers, process control personnel, integrators, end users and automation professionals have regarding the new technology

DCS vendors queue up for security validation
Vancouver-based Wurldtech Security Technologies is fast becoming the de facto official determinant of all matters cybersecurity related