Control and Instrumentation articles from July 1998

Control and Instrumentation archives from July 1998

Somewhere in the ether.
July 1, 1998... FIELDBUS Talk about history repeating itself. Ten years ago the industrial world was hyped up about (the ill-fated) Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP). The reason MAP failed was that it attempted to define everything and ended up too...

C&I celebrates 40 years. ('Control & Instrumentation' magazine)
July 1, 1998... future looks good As a new millennium beckons, C&I looks back on the first 40 years of publication - and to the future It was in early 1958 when Reg Medlock, a consultant to C&I's forerunner publication Control, was ushered into the offices...

Keeping a level head.
July 1, 1998... The latest electronic level gauging systems provide rate-of-change data in safety-critical situations Thanks to the instrument manufacturers' pursuit of greater accuracy, today's process engineer has access to a versatile range of level...

Testing times for programmable positioners.
July 1, 1998... The latest breed of electro-pneumatic positioners promise numerous operating and financial benefits over more traditional 'forced balance' systems Although microprocessors have penetrated virtually every facet of control, their adoption in...

GBP2m pledge for C&I research
July 1, 1998... Sharon Everitt Process engineering and process chemistry companies have pledged GBP2.2m support to The Centre for Process Analytics and Control Technology (CPACT) for the next three years to lead the group into the second phase of its...

Euro currency battle hots up
July 1, 1998... Last month's further polarisation of the pro- and anti-euro currency camps received a mixed response from C&I industries. Siemens, which only three months ago became the first multinational to set up a UK bank account dealing in euros, again...

Green for danger
July 1, 1998... Matthew Peach Modifications to processes with the aim of meeting new production or emissions standards can actually make plants more dangerous. So says industrial troubleshooters Burgoyne Consultants, of Ilkley, Yorkshire. Associate director...

Cost cutting bid to boost sales
July 1, 1998... There was heartening news last month for equipment buyers as a range of manufacturers cut their equipment prices. Fluke announced price cuts of up to 38% to around GBP450 on its temperature, pressure and voltage/current calibrators, in an...

Smart money for SMEs
July 1, 1998... The 1998 round of Smart, the grants scheme for innovation and development in small firms, has been launched with around GBP28m in grants available for successful companies. Margaret Beckett, president of the Board of Trade, said: 'A dynamic...

LIMS reach out
July 1, 1998... Laboratory information management system (LIMS) system supplier LabSystems has complemented its SampleManager system with the launch of Nautilus, aimed at what it refers to as 'laboratory-centric' jobs. Nautilus has a Microsoft Office 'look...

Ford's fiesta
July 1, 1998... Ford has chosen Schneider as the PLC supplier for its biggest ever new engine project. The multi-million pound order for controls used in the production of the new Inline 4/Inline 5 cylinder engine was given on the basis that Schneider's...

Imperial die-hards win reprieve
July 1, 1998... Industry sighed with relief last month at the news that European Commissioners were bowing to pressure to retain the Imperial system of measurement beyond the 31 December 1999 deadline. It is almost 20 years since the appearance of the...

PC-based control 'to soar'
July 1, 1998... The use of PC-based control systems is forecast to grow by 535% in Europe between now and year 2000, with the automotive industry the most enthusiastic about the shift from PLC-based systems, Research company MarketLine International questioned...

UK Co denies 'culture clash'
July 1, 1998... Siebe last month scored a victory over Nemic-Lambda, the Japanese company in which it holds a majority shareholding, with the resignation of its founder, chairman and president Rikihiro Madarame after a protracted boardroom battle. But as...

Compaq pays $9.6bn for minicomputer ace Digital
July 1, 1998... Digital, the giant name in industrial computing in the 1960s and '70s which lost its way with the advent of PCs, has been acquired by Compaq for US$9.6bn (GBP6,075m). The transaction is believed to be the largest acquisition in the history of the...

Jobs to go, shares dip
July 1, 1998... Siebe shares continued to fall last month after the group's announcement that 4,000 jobs will go in a global shake-up to boost efficiency. Trading in shares tumbled to less than GBP12 from a year high of GBP15.80 as the City pondered...

'Environment will profit' - Zellweger
July 1, 1998... Zellweger, the multinational manufacturer and supplier of gas, air and water monitoring equipment, has recently delivered record financial results. Reporting sales of CHF161.6m (GBP66m), and net income of CHF48.7m (GBP20m), the Zellweger Luwa...

Open control for new Irish plant
July 1, 1998... A new pharmaceutical plant being built to expand the operations of Pharmacia & Upjohn Cork in the Irish Republic, is to be automated using open control and batch optimisation technology from ABB Industrial Systems. The plant is expected to...

Clarifiers made redundant
July 1, 1998... The Environmental Division of Cegelec Projects has received an order for mechanical and electrical equipment at a new Wastewater Treatment Works in Ganol, North Wales. Awarded by Dwr Cymru, Welsh Water, the contract is worth over GBP1.5m. The...

Kit homes in on leaky water pipes
July 1, 1998... Dynamic Logic (DL) has been awarded a contract to supply and install a leak detection system to Gibraltar's water company Lyonnaise des Eaux. As there is no natural water in Gibraltar - it all comes from the sea - water destined for human...

Nobel effort takes the load
July 1, 1998... Rhone-Poulenc Chemicals of Manchester has commissioned 13 Nobel Systems load cell weighing systems for the manufacture of pressure-sensitive adhesives and defoamers. The water-based latex adhesives are used in applications such as paper...

Rolling mills ensure metals remain flat
July 1, 1998... To achieve optimum flatness quality in its metals production, British Steel has installed two five-stand rolling mills to work with its stressometer. The installation is part of a refurbishment at the company's South Wales-based plant, and...

Microsoft deal means training of 4000 at ICL
July 1, 1998... ICL has signed a strategic alliance with Microsoft which will see 4,000 ICL engineers trained in the use and installation of Microsoft products, as part of a strategy to offer 'consumer focused' applications. ICL chief executive Keith Todd...

Intellution integrates FIX
July 1, 1998... Intellution is to embed its first major third-party-supplied component into its FIX Dynamics component object solution for manufacturing. This will be OSI's PI System, following an agreement with OSI Software. FIX Dynamics uses an I-Core...

Tornado whips up a global storm for Java
July 1, 1998... 'Write once, run anywhere' Java applications are at last possible in the embedded development environment with Tornado for Java, the first to pass Sun's Java compatibility test suite, says supplier Wind River. The result is a step towards...

For the sake of auld ... Y2K
July 1, 1998... Ciriz Technologies is the latest company to jump on the bandwagon of providing Year 2000 software solutions, generating program code conversion from its transformation centre at Marlow. The company will offer software portfolio assessment,...

'First' pen remote control
July 1, 1998... Interlink Electronics says it has developed the world's first pen-capable remote control - the FreedomWriterOEM. Developed for manufacturers of presentation and collaborative computing systems, the handheld FreedomWriter features pen input,...

Window-Frame is flexible
July 1, 1998... FrameworX, an object-oriented software package for factory control and automation, has been introduced by Total Control Products. Developed in conjunction with Total Control's automotive clients, FrameworX allows PC-based control, man-machine...

Watching over watchmaking
July 1, 1998... Swiss watch maker Conseil & Manufactures VLG, which makes timepieces for Cartier, Piaget and Baume & Mercier, has chosen an information management system from Matrix One. 'We expect significant gains,' said Arnaud Mizrahi, project manager at...

100,000 pints a day - and counting
July 1, 1998... Everards Brewery, in Leicester, has installed a GE Fanuc PLC control system to automate its cleaning in place, chilling, pasteurisation, storage, batching and kegging processes. The system includes a Series 90-70 PLC with extensive I/0 plus a...

Embedded WebFarm tests netware
July 1, 1998... Phar Lap Software has introduced an Embedded WebFarm, an evaluation centre that enables visiting engineers to run live comparative hardware benchmarks and check out various embedded Internet devices. Different hardware can be tried in...

C&I CELEBRATES 40 YEARS
July 1, 1998... future looks good It was in early 1958 when Reg Medlock, a consultant to C&I's forerunner publication Control, was ushered into the offices of Rowse Muir to advise on the scope and subject matter of a proposed new publication. It would fulfil...

Solutions are geared to industry needs
July 1, 1998... Manufacturing facilities in more than 30 countries; a reported annual revenue of $31.3bn (1997); and a hefty research and development budget amounting to some 8% of its gross income. These are just some of the statistics quoted by ABB Industrial...

Investment in the future
July 1, 1998... With annual sales exceeding GBP2.7bn, Siebe Intelligent Automation (SIA) is the largest division of Siebe plc, Windsor, UK. Following a number of strategic recent acquisitions and organic growth since its formation in 1994, SIA, the Foxboro,...

Silicon spurs on growth
July 1, 1998... John Salmon, group chairman and founder launched Druck on 1 January, 1972, and in 26 years the company had grown from just two employees and first year sales of GBP20,000 into a world-wide group of companies employing almost 800 people, with a...

Sensoring leads to complete point solution
July 1, 1998... Rosemount of the USA was just two years old in 1958, although the Fisher companies, with which the former merged six years ago, can be traced back as far as 1880. Rosemount itself came to the UK in 1960, then based in Kingston-upon-Thames, before...

E+H switches to safer level
July 1, 1998... Over 40 years, Endress + Hauser has progressed from a capacitance level company to a full range field instrument supplier, offering nine different techniques for monitoring level. E+H has also gained leading positions in flow measurement and...

Sizing down spells success
July 1, 1998... Miniaturisation of measuring instruments has to be one of the major landmarks of the past 40 years. Back then, the term 'hand-held', in the context of an instrument to measure voltage would have seemed preposterous. Moving coil analogue...

DCS makes its impact on control industry
July 1, 1998... Forty years have seen some uncannily accurate, or fatally flawed, industry predictions. But surely no-one could have foretold the microprocessor revolution resulting, in the early 1960s, in the first DCS - Honeywell's TDC2000 - or that it would...

First FIX defines automation solutions
July 1, 1998... Today's Intellution bears little resemblance to the controls industry consultancy founded in 1980 by chief executive and president, Stephen Rubin. With more than 82,000 installations worldwide, the company is a global supplier of industrial...

Meters are first step to success
July 1, 1998... In the 1950s, Krohne was spearheading the development of batch flow meters and level indicators for high pressure applications. By 1958, the company was manufacturing float operated, tank level indicators with magnetic couplings, and building a...

Crusade for intrinsic safety
July 1, 1998... In the 1970s, a series of articles in C&I discussed the current problems in process instrumentation (15 articles in 10 years) and tended to become more concentrated on aspects of intrinsic safety as the direction of MTL's development became more...

Made in Manchester - covering the globe
July 1, 1998... Omega Engineering, a leading manufacturer of temperature measurement and process control equipment, has established a major presence in Manchester. Based at the River Bend Technology Centre, which has been purpose built for its use, the...

Task-driven control the key?
July 1, 1998... Forty years ago, control was almost entirely mechanical and when change was required the whole physical structure of a plant also had to change. But today electronic communications, as Omron's Clive Lattimer explains, have made possible the...

Bellowing in the markers
July 1, 1998... This year, Partex is celebrating its golden anniversary. The company was founded in Sweden in 1948 as Elecro-Loof, and its original range of modern cable markers - for which it is the inventor - appeared on the market in 1951. These markers were...

Health and safety takes the front seat
July 1, 1998... From humble beginnings as a manufacturer of medical glassware 50 years ago this year, Pilz GmbH moved into the field of electronics in the fifties and sixties. By the seventies, its standardisation of specific electronic components had begun to...

A question of temperature
July 1, 1998... Following World War II, research highlighted the possible use of infrared radiation as a means of non-contact temperature measurement. The California-based founders of Raytek developed one of the earliest systems to accomplish this technique...

Staying ahead in systems
July 1, 1998... Rockwell is best known for a range of products encompassing the whole gamut of industrial control, from switches and control lights, motors and drives to computers and software. It is, however, also closely associated with the programmable...

From autos to automation
July 1, 1998... Over the past 40 years, industrial process control and automation have changed just as dramatically as every other aspect of our lives, especially those touched by developments in electronics and communications. In the late 1960s, PLCs began...

SCADA sector's GREYING MATTER
July 1, 1998... The PC-based SCADA market is at a mature stage in its life cycle. Established, leading suppliers - such as Wonderware, Intellution, Ci Technologies, US Data and National Instruments hold the majority share, alike in having large existing...

Keeping a LEVEL HEAD
July 1, 1998... CHRIS WEBB Thanks to the instrument manufacturers' pursuit of greater accuracy, today's process engineer has access to a versatile range of level measurement devices which guarantee high accuracy, even under extreme operating conditions. Along...

Testing times for PROGRAMMABLE POSITIONERS
July 1, 1998... CHRIS WEBB Although microprocessors have penetrated virtually every facet of control, their adoption in valve mounted instrumentation and in particular valve positioners and controllers has been sluggish. Analogue electronic controls, which...