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.

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.

The iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge, which was opened in 1932, is one of Australia’s most well known and photographed landmarks, along with the Sydney Opera House. The bridge is the world’s largest steel arch bridge with a total length of 2.3 km, the top of the bridge standing 134 metres above the harbour.

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.

Sensor technology is constantly evolving, giving OEM packaging machine designers new ways to reduce the cost of their machine designs. In Part 1 we looked at reducing the cost of changeovers with linear position sensing. This time we look at simpler, more reliable power connections, rotary encoders and optical detection.

Today, carbon dioxide (CO₂) is considered to be the largest environmental threat to our world by most researchers. Heightened levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to global warming, which in the long run can jeopardise our future on this planet.

The demand for safety technology in bulk liquid storage plants is increasing worldwide. This market trend can clearly be seen in tank gauging projects where Safety Integrity Level (SIL) requirements are now being incorporated.

Pressure is one of the fundamental quantities measured in processing and manufacturing systems.

The new generation of embedded computing platform has no moving parts, no fans, and has components that require less power than before.

In recent times, environmental life cycle assessment has become an important part of packaging design, but with changing packaging materials, and improving recycling and waste disposal technologies, keeping up to date with those factors that affect the packaging life cycle is a costly and time-consuming process. A web-based tool based on centrally updated data provides the answer.

Emerson Smart Wireless technology is enabling polyethylene maker INEOS to detect blocked filters within polyethylene pellet transportation tubes that can lead to production downtime at its plant in Cologne, Germany.

Germany’s paper industry has a turnover of approximately 14.9 billion euro and a total of 3000 different kinds of paper are manufactured at around 180 production locations. Manufacturing paper using air motors ensures that the ravenous paper appetite of industrial nations is continuously satisfied.

Companies like AVN Energy, a Danish manufacturer of wind-power equipment, are creating the technology which now provides 20% of Denmark’s electricity production. AVN co-operated with The Trelleborg Group’s Sealing Solutions to develop seals for their wind power actuators.