robotics and process control engineer

service robotics is a naive industry but growing at a rapid pace. recently i came across an article by micheal somby who is a robotics hobbyist and a process control engineer!
He is a professional control systems engineer focusing on avionics systems and industrial control systems. His experience ranges from an autopilot design up to building a control system for a power plant.
He has written an article on software robotics platform wherein he describes the appllication of robotics in service industry, which was recently given an update
He quotes

"The cost of control software accounts for a large share of the overall cost of
a typical robotics project. For example, up to 80 percent of an industrial
automation project is spent on system integration, which includes software
development/customization. So, the main idea behind any robotics software
platform is to simplify the job of robotics software engineers -- and thus
reduce the project cost. "

He has discussed various platforms in his article like the URBI, Webots, OROCOS, iRobot microsoft robotics studio and skilligent all of them which help to develop the project.Microsoft robotics studio has been supported by many users while skilligent involves a" training the robot approach" instead of giving a runtime environment. He has also discussed webots and other platforms in his article. There are loads of them out there according to the application you want.

development in robotics will definitely help to run process plants better and efficiently and of course touch our own lives!!
you can get the complete article on "http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT9631072539.html"

Control systems in tissue engineering

Tissue engineering has a lot of potential for growth. Recently I came across an article on Technology Review mag published by the famous institution MIT..... that discussess the Tissue engineering.

They quote....."Tissue engineers are ambitious. If they had their way, a dialysis patient could receive a new kidney made in the lab from his own cells, instead of waiting for a donor organ that his immune system might reject. Likewise, a diabetic could, with grafts of lab-made pancreatic tissue, be given the ability to make insulin again. But tissue engineering has stalled in part because bioengineers haven't been able to replicate the structural complexity of human tissues. Now researchers have taken an important first step toward building complex tissues from the bottom up by creating what they call living Legos. These building blocks, biofriendly gels of various shapes studded with cells, can self-assemble into complex structures resembling those found in tissues."

According to a bioengineer Ali Khademhosseini, at Harvard Medical School
"Living tissues have repeating functional units. The liver, for example, is made
up of repeated hexagonal lobes. Each has a central branching vessel that brings
in blood for filtration; the vessel and its branches are surrounded by
toxin-filtering cells surrounded by canals that transport filtered blood to
other vessels leading out of the organ".

Khademhosseini method works on the basic principle that water and oil don't mix.

"When water is dropped into a pool of oil, it will form a sphere, the shape that
minimizes its interaction with the oil."Bioengineers seed cells onto the outside
of polymer scaffolds in the hopes that they will migrate inside and organize
themselves.

Controlling the cell organization is the most important part of the entire process. We might soon be able to replicate parts like pancreas, liver and heart muscle.

It might seem very far fetch at this point of time but I do believe that automation companies would come up with higher competant control systems for tissue engineering.

To know more about Khademhosseini wonderful research you may visit http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotechhappy reading!!

control system cyber security

I recently read an article "Peril in the pipeline" by Marshall Abrams and Joe Weiss. The article is more eyeopening rather than interesting as it investigates deeper into the unresponsiveness of the SCADA system on 10 June 1999 which was controlling the pipeline system owned by Olympic Pipeline Company. The system could not detect the rupture in 16inch dia pipeline which in turn resulted in gasoline leaking into the Hanna and Whatcom Creeks in Whatcom Falls Park within Bellingham, Wash.
The effects of the disaster were tremendous causing injuries to people and killing two 10-year-old boys and an 18 year old man.

Both Marshall and Joe admit that "
.... more discussion is needed about control system cyber security and how its policies and countermeasures can potentially preclude or minimize the impacts of a control system cyber security event....."

The SCADA system consisted of........

SCADA vector (object-based editing) software running on two virtual
asset extension (VAX) computers with virtual memory system (VMS) operation
system Version 7.1. [VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an
orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i.e.,
demand paged virtual memory)]

In addition to this there was a seperate computere for pipeline leak detection system software package. As Marshall and Joe point out...

"The VAX-VMS was designed to be a multi-user system and was capable of keeping
track of hundreds of simultaneous users. Each user was allocated his/her
share of system resources, and each user was only permitted to run or view
files associated with that person’s user identification (login). Extensive
operating system accountability and permission logs documented the resources
used by any user. Only one login was employed by all Olympic operators,
which allowed them to have undifferentiated system administrator privileges,
including manipulation or deletion of any file on the system."

Three reasons were given for this accident, firstly the damage, gouges, and dents to the pipeline in the vicinity of the eventual rupture. Second was the construction and startup of the Bayview products terminal. Some pressure elief vakves were installed initially which were later founs to be improperly installed and configured. Last but the most important the SCADA system became unresponsive making things extremely tough for the controllers.

Digging deeper into Why the SCADA system was not able to respond the report of the National Transportation Safety Board......

"There was no indication of an in-place cyber security program, including control system policies and procedures"

The forensic report showed that......

A comprehensive control system cyber security program was not in place nor
was appropriate SCADA operator training. The SCADA system appeared
to have diagnostics capabilities, but those capabilities were not
configured to address internal cyber issues. In addition, system logs that should have been automatically generated were inexplicably missing. The single backbone Ethernet network did not provide adequate separation from the real-time systems and non-critical business network."

Though the technology has improved a lot today but the ghosts of 10th June 1999 will continue to haunt the control system professionals and keep reminding them that a mistake in ther job might cause precious human lives.

The Olympic Pipeline Company has subsequently gone out of business.

The complete article can be found on ISAs' website"http://www.isa.org/InTechTemplate.cfm?Section=Article_Index1&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=69643"

Marshall Abrams is a principal scientist at MITRE Corporation, a national resource center with expertise in systems engineering and information technology in McLean, Va. and Joe Weiss Joe Weiss, LLC PE, CISM, is an executive consultant at Applied Control Solutions in Cupertino, Calif.

Modern Temeperature Transmitters

one thing that has caught my eye recently has been EDDL. The technology is jus going great guns, as Jonas Berge recently put up an article Temperature Transmitters: Warming Up To EDDL. You may recall him from my earlier posts. Jonas is a senior PlantWeb consultant at Emerson Process Management.
Temperature transmitter use a variety of protocols today includind wirless HART and Foundation Fieldbus. As Jonas rightly puts it "Supporting this mix of transmitters can be a challenge. However, modern temperature transmitters diagnose themselves, the sensor wiring, and the temperature element."
These have greatly helped in maintaining the loops and has got the plants running more effectively. A burnout in the TT can burn a deep hole in the customers pocket. With the use of EDDL we can easily switch through the dynamic displays and get into the problem immediately. The two important diagnostics discussed are sensor drift and hot backup.
Jonas discusses sensor drift alert as "A sensor with dual sensing elements at one measurement point takes two readings that are compared and if a maximum difference is exceeded, the diagnostics determines that drift has occurred." This gives more insight to the operator as it directly shows the diagnostics on the operator consoles.
Another important advanced diagnostic is the hot-backup. "For this, two sensors measure the same point. In normal operation the reading of one sensor is used, but if the primary sensor fails its value is discarded and the backup sensor reading is used." This is pretty well important.
Even the handheld communicators are designed by the same EDDL technology providing the technicians advanced troubleshooting and of-course they are even offered help by EDDL wizards to make there job easy!!
Those inerested can surely go through this wonderful article by Jonas Berge on www.iaasiaonline.com [Home --> Instrumentation & Measurement]

pressure transmitters...the EDDL way!

Pressure transmitters have evolved much in the several years.These transmitters specialise in areas such as DP Flow, Mass Flow, Safety Certified, and Diagnostics and have been recently talked about by Dale Perry, pressure product manager and Jonas Berge, senior PlantWeb consultant, Emerson Process Management.
They quote "The next frontier of making pressure transmitters easy to use was the display used to start-up, maintain, calibrate, and troubleshoot. Historically there was no display standardisation. The dilemma was that the pressure transmitter manufacturer could not dictate the system display or accessible transmitter functionality on a system"
EDDL has come a long way in the process of evolution. We can have a display which completes removes the complexity of a pressure transmitter, thus making it simple to use.

Both Dale and Jonas write "Before enhanced EDDL there was no graphics for quick visualisation of the pressure transmitter diagnostic status nor could you look at the current PV and tell what the pressure was two minutes ago. And if the device had multiple variables there would be multiple numbers to look at and do math and correlation in your head."

All this has now become easy with EDDL (Electronic device description language) standard IEC 61804. Finally Dale and Jonas write "EDDL is the key to interoperability in a digital plant architecture".....very true indeed.

You can find the complete article 'Pressure Transmitters: EDDL Equals Easy' on http://www.iaasiaonline.com/?pname=news&nc=im&nid=173.
very interesting and informative read....

process safety

I make it a practise to listen to podcast series published on http://controlglobalnews.com/portal/wts/ccmceQa96QaqjBzqsfjMbefsmNh
this time i came across Ashish Ghosh podcast on process safety.
Ashish Ghosh has worked in the field of process safety for over 35years now and is currently with the ARC group.
In the podcast Ashish gives his opinion on the how alarm management is very important for the operators, but at the same time stresses that it is not the only solution and overall safety culture is of utmost importance. According to him the BP texas hazard has less to do with standards and their implementation and more with the management's safety culture.
Goverment stds were also questioned and Ashish feels that in the US they are currently inadequate. He gives the example of germany where the govt makes it mandatory to follow the safety rules but in the US; it is like "you should do it" or "you may do it"..its not "you have to do it".
Also question on baby boomers retiring and sarban-oxley act were discussed. To listen to entire podcast you may visit the above website. It is very interesting and with Walt asking all the possible questions, it gets even better slowly with listening to Ashish's experienced answers....must hear this one!!
chus!!

unwritten pump rules

I make use of watch that page change a site that keeps you informed of if there are any changes on the site of your interest. It is a very good tool to use to track if anything new has been added to your site.
One of the site that i follow is www.flowcontrolnetwork.com. It belongs to Larry Bachus, founder of pump services firm Bachus Company Inc., is a regular contributor to Flow Control magazine. He is a pump consultant, lecturer, and inventor based in Nashville, Tenn.
He has currently updated his article on the rules for pumps. I have directly adopted the information from his webpage. It is an interesting read and i would recommend everyone to go through his cheats.
"At work, you might be responsible for the reliability of 50 or 300 centrifugal pumps. How can you stand next to one of these pumps, observe it, and perceive if the pump is sick or healthy? (No one teaches this at the university!) The following are a few generally accepted rules to keep in mind.
Rule No. 1: At 1,800 RPM, the impeller diameter in inches, multiplied by itself (or squared), is approximately the shutoff head of the pump in feet. Why does the first rule begin with 1,800 RPM? In the states, most industrial pumps are powered by an electric motor on 60-Hz electricity. The most popular industrial electric motor (88 percent) is a four-pole motor, meaning the rated velocity is 1,800 RPM. (The motor may have a slip factor, so the actual speed might be 1,780 or 1,750 RPM. This is indicated on the electric motor identification tag.) What is the shutoff head? The shutoff head is the beginning of the pump curve. It represents maximum elevation (in feet or meters) at zero flow. The performance curve proceeds to and ends at a point called maximum flow at zero elevation. How do you begin with inches of impeller diameter and end with approximate feet of liquid elevation? It’s too complicated to explain in this short column, but that’s the way it is. (If you would like more in-depth discussion of this issue, I encourage you to attend my next Pump Guy Seminar. See the promo box at the end of this article for details.)
The BEH of the 10-inch impeller is 88 ft., about 85 percent of the shutoff head. BEH of the nine-inch impeller is 70 ft., about 85 percent of the shutoff head. BEH of the eight-inch impeller is 54 ft., about 85 percent of the shutoff head.Why do you say, approximate? It’s just a rule or guide. It isn’t a law. It is accurate within about 5 percent. There are variables that affect the result. What if the pump/motor is not spinning at 1,800 RPM? We’ll cover this in a future “Cheat Sheet” article.
Rule No. 2: The best efficiency head (BEH) of the pump is approximately 85 percent of the shutoff head.
Rule No. 3: Operate the pump at, or close to, the BEH.The pump doesn’t want to run at shutoff head. It wants to run at the BEH or the best efficiency point (BEP) on the curve. On most pumps, the BEH is approximately 85 percent of the shutoff head. In almost all cases, the BEH is somewhere between 80 percent and 90 percent of the shutoff head. So, 85 percent is a good starting point to determine the pump’s head and flow."
For the entire article i will urge you to visit his site http://www.flowcontrolnetwork.com/issuearticle.asp?ArticleID=245
The rules dont apply to all pumps but 88% of the pumps you can work with these rules.
Njoy reading and dwelve more into the wonderful world of pumps.