Search

Auditors, like most businesspeople, are frequently under pressure to complete their work expeditiously and adhere to a budget. Sometimes that can lead to testing decisions that consume fewer audit resources [...]

Process automation systems (PASs) are big-ticket items. Whether they are part of new plant construction, an upgrade to an existing facility, or a long-planned plant expansion, deciding how to choose [...]

The guidance document supporting process analytical technology (PAT) released by the US Food & Drug Administration department is part of a broader initiative on current Good Manufacturing Practices to be followed by the pharmaceutical industry. The agency says that the goal of the PAT, which involves on-line, in-line, or at-line measurements at critical processing points for feedback and quality control, is to design and develop processes that ensure quality products.

Complex parts with many quality characteristics require many control charts and capability indexes. The capability indexes can be reduced to one, which is an effective way to measure producibility and find the part's worst feature.

With Microsoft and the PC appearing to dominate development, what's the future for control? Discrete manufacturing systems, at least, will increasingly be controlled by PCs instead of PLCs. So claimed […]

Buses are arriving and beginning to fill up - we look at the choices, on Frank McKenna's review and papers at Fieldbus '95 at C&I In recent years the term […]

Technological advances have enabled portable spectrophotometers to become the preferred instrument for on-site color analysis. Aside from their size and low cost, portable spectrophotometers also offer high levels of accuracy and repeatability, prompting most experts to predict that they will eventually dominate color management processes. Ideal applications of these instruments include quick pass/fail color evaluation, color matching, and color data transmission.

Byline: Friedman, Y. Z. Advancec process control (APC) requires skilled control engineers, and where such engineers are not available, even well-implemented APC applications quickly become ineffective. That much is known [...]

Multi-use, hybrid facilities are becoming the standard in the life sciences industry rather than the exception. Most facilities are designed to serve more than one purpose. While housing a manufacturing [...]

A Department of Energy (DoE) evaluation of software developed to promote clean-coal use found that some systems worked and others didn't succeed. The evaluation discussed three software systems developed under [...]

If less is more, then the SCHWINN computer must be worth its weight in gold because it has no buttons at all. Actually, that's not quite true, there is one […]

SCADA/HMI systems will play a pivotal role in world-class manufacturing enterprises - but what should you be looking for? With the popularity of Windows-based automation solutions, SCADA and HMI stems […]

As 'PCS' threatens again to become the universal acronym, what exactly can we expect? For those of us long enough in the tooth in this industry, the term PCS (Process […]

Shrink-wrapped software is one hell of a commodity, and its influence throughout industry, as a route to effective integration, can only grow - can't it? Shrink-wrapped software' - off-the-shelf applications […]

The importance of process control fundamentals is discussed. Insuring quality and quantity of products is the main goal of automatic control systems, which maintain important process variables at set point values. A bad control strategy which is designed and implemented from day one can be avoided if engineers had not forgotten the basics of process control.

Once the learning curve is climbed and program risks understood, fieldbus will save design work as well as providing other benefits Uncharted territory and personal opinion are terms inherent in […]

Subtle but far reaching changes are taking place in process control which are bound to alter the way control is both viewed and implemented in the 21st century. These are […]