Process instrumentation technicians who implement good pH electrode maintenance regimes get more than just greater accuracy in pH measurement. They also benefit from a longer interval between cleaning cycles and extended productivity during a longer life cycle, significantly reducing running costs.

The key factor driving investment in wastewater treatment all over the world is cost reduction, and the only way to maintain high standards while reducing costs is to utilise highly sophisticated measurement and process control technology.

Ethernet is the most prevalent LAN application worldwide, offering the benefits of standardisation, low-cost components and high-performance switching technology. It’s easy to configure and install.

New digital technology now makes it feasible to integrate process control and safety instrumented functions within a common automation infrastructure. While this can provide productivity and asset management benefits, if not done correctly, it can also compromise the safety and security of an industrial operation. This makes it critically important for process industry users to understand where to draw the line. Cyber-security and sabotage vulnerability further accentuate the need for securing the Safety Instrumented System (SIS).

It’s often a requirement of many manufacturing processes to have the operators become directly involved in the machine action at the unloading point, either to unload or secure the outbound product. Unfortunately, the outfeed sections of most processes are notoriously dangerous, so in reality we should be striving to remove the operators from the area at all times.

Swiss company Carbo-Link creates carbon fibre components for challenging applications such as rigging for racing yachts.

Parker Instrumentation’s fluid connector, Phastite, has simplified the construction of a state-of-the-art facility for testing dry gas compressor seals at John Crane’s new turbomachinery facility in Slough, UK. The connector’s combination of high-pressure operation and push-fit assembly has allowed the company to make considerable time savings compared with a system built using the conventional options of cone-and-thread and welded tube connections.

Hotter than the sun and yet in one of the coldest places on earth, the largest machine in the world is 27 km long, lives 100 m underground and spans two countries. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, more commonly known as CERN, has designed the machine, known as the Large Hadron Collider, to reveal the secrets of the universe.

The power, oil and gas, and chemical processing industries have been using real-time dynamic process simulation for decades and now the minerals processing industry can follow suit.

When TrimPile decided to take its pile-trimming and concrete-breaking business to the next level, the company chose air compressor and jackhammer technology from Sullair Australia.

Joel Young explores how to mix different wireless technologies, including cellular, Wi-Fi/802.11, WiMAX/802.16, ZigBee/802.15.4 and proprietary wireless, to form a successful commercial or industrial deployment.

Not so long ago the main reason companies monitored equipment condition was to reduce direct maintenance expenses. Condition monitoring and its logical extension, condition-based maintenance, served them well by identifying impending failures early enough to avoid costly repairs and reducing downtime by only performing maintenance when required.

Process plants can make significant reductions in energy usage, with appropriate focus. Using the techniques presented here it is typical to see energy savings from 0.5% to 2% of total energy cost, with some plants seeing as much as 20% reduction. These techniques can be applied with little capital investment.

Among the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant’s numerous accolades are top awards for construction excellence and project management which it won earlier this year. At the heart of the plant is a sophisticated and future-proofed instrumentation and control strategy that has helped make the project a model for other desalination plants being considered — not only within Australia but also worldwide. This strategy also propelled the plant to a win in the recent Zenith Awards, where it won Best Automation Project 2007.

Australians, by and large, have responded differently to the devastating drought of the past few years. The Queensland government’s response was to initiate major water management reforms. In 2005, the Beattie government established the Queensland Water Commission and set aside $9 billion to overhaul the management, distribution and marketing of water through the SE Queensland Water Grid.