European pump conference!

WEG is to sponsor the Europump Conference which is to be held at St. Andrews in Scotland in May 2014.

As part of its involvement in the event Mr Siegfried Kreutzfeld, Managing Director- Motors Division for WEG is to deliver a paper to the delegates that will address the market trends for alternating current, permanent magnet and synchronous reluctance motors. WEG is of course well-placed to deliver a research paper on these subjects as a global leader in energy efficient motors.

This conference is hosted this year by the British Pump Manufacturers Association (BPMA) conducts vital work for the pump industry on legislation and standards and is a combination of presentations, working groups and committees and networking meetings.

Commenting on the decision to invite WEG to sponsor the conference for 2014, Steve Schofield, Director of the BPMA said, “The work that takes place during the conference is vital to the well-being of the pump industry in Europe and of enormous value. We were pleased to align ourselves with WEG as the sponsor, as the company has an outstanding reputation for pushing the boundaries in motor and automation technology.”

Commenting on the sponsorship Marek Lukaszczyk, Marketing Director for Europe for WEG said, “Obviously the pump industry is closely aligned with WEG as a manufacturer of electric drives and motors commonly used within the fluid movement industry. The opportunity to help facilitate the Europump conference and to help make the event a success, is something we are proud to be able to do.”

Direct insertion density & concentration meter!

Fork Density meter helps users achieve fast-response density and concentration monitoring in challenging conditions

The next generation of Emerson's market-leading Micro Motion 7826 and 7828 direct insertion density meters has been released. Incorporating the same rugged and reliable tuning fork design as its predecessors, the Fork Density Meter is built to tackle the most demanding process applications such as pipeline interface detection, mineral slurry solids monitoring and corrosive acid concentration control.

The direct insertion Fork Density Meter is the ideal choice for solving problems that customers face on a daily basis, such as reducing product give-away, minimising cross-contamination on multi-product pipelines and ensuring operator safety when sampling hazardous liquids. It is designed for applications where fast-response density and concentration monitoring is required, even when the installation footprint is limited.

The Fork Density Meter incorporates a hazardous area head-mounted transmitter that has the flexibility to digitally connect to distributed control systems (DCS) as well as output raw sensor signals to signal converters and flow computers. With 4-20mA, HART®, WirelessHART®, Sensor Time Period, FOUNDATION fieldbus and RS485 Modbus communications all supported, the system integration and start-up/commissioning costs are significantly reduced.

With the implementation of HART and RS485 Modbus digital I/O communications, the Micro Motion Fork Density Meter has the capability to accept external signals from other field instrumentation such as temperature, pressure and volumetric flow devices. The input of these external measurements enables the Fork Density Meter to calculate and output enhanced process measurements such as mass flow and net solids flow, while still minimising installation and cabling costs.

The Fork Density Meter also incorporates a new diagnostic capability called Known Density Verification that checks the meter for measurement alarm conditions, sensor integrity and the presence of coating, erosion or corrosion. This new technology expands the availability of diagnostics information in critical density measurement applications, resulting in significant reductions in maintenance costs and cycle times.

Best company to work for!

For the sixth consecutive year SolutionsPT is celebrating being named in the prestigious British newspaper, Sunday Times as on of the 100 Best Small Companies to Work For.

SolutionsPT, which provides software, hardware and consultancy services to more than 2,000 industrial and manufacturing organisations across Ireland and Britain, employs 80 people at its site in Cheadle (GB).

The 100 Best Small Companies to Work For list is compiled following an in-depth questionnaire answered by employees across the business, covering areas including leadership, personal growth, giving something back, wellbeing, protecting the environment and work life balance.

SolutionsPT ranked 44th in this year’s awards, which attracted entries from 897 businesses and organisations.

SolutionsPT enters the awards each year as part of its commitment to highlighting the career opportunities available in the IT and engineering sector.

General Manager of SolutionsPT, Phil Gillard, said: "For us, entering these awards is about ensuring we’ve created a dynamic, challenging and exciting place for our existing employees, but it’s also about ensuring we attract the best talent in the industry and demonstrate the opportunities that exist within this sector.”


Louise Potts, SolutionsPT's People and Culture Manager, added: “Entering Best Companies gives us a great internal framework for monitoring the happiness of our team and the contribution we make to our community. Looking after our people is a vital part of ensuring we retain the talented individuals that make up the SolutionsPT team and continue to deliver a great service to our customers.”

Automation induction!

Dave Emerson of Yokogawa Corporation of America has been selected by CONTROL magazine, to be inducted into the Process Automation Hall of Fame, Class of 2014. Mr. Emerson is director of Yokogawa’s U.S. Development Center.

Dave Emerson

The Process Automation Hall of Fame was created in 2001 to recognize the contributions made by outstanding process automation professionals working in the process automation and control industry. Members include Yutaka Wakasa, a former Yokogawa director and the first Japanese inductee, and Dr. Maurice J. Wilkins, Vice President of the Yokogawa IA Global Strategic Technology Marketing Center in Dallas.

The nomination of Mr. Emerson reflects the following significant contributions that he has made to the control industry:

He is the creator and co-developer of the Batch Markup Language (BatchML) and the Business to Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML). Based on XML, these have become the de facto standards in the process automation industry for the exchange of ISA-95 and ISA-88  data between ERP and MES/control systems. B2MML has saved companies millions of dollars by reducing costs for their manufacturing operations.

He also served as Vice Chairman of the ISA-95 committee, played a primary role in the creation of a technical report on the integration of ISA-95 and ISA-88, and led the creation of the procedure function charts defined in ISA-88 Part 2. These two standards have been globally adopted by industrial automation system suppliers and have helped owners/operators lower their system integration costs and attain operational excellence by making more effective use of their manufacturing systems.

He has been instrumental in proposing and developing the ISA-106 standard and is currently serving as its editor. As a leading contributor to the ISA-106 committee, he is working to standardize the automation of continuous processes and thereby assure safer operations, less variability within processes, and improved profits.

Encouraged by this award, Yokogawa will continue working to contribute to society and achieve progress in the control industry by developing and introducing advanced control solutions based on excellent control technologies.

Power usage effectiveness efficiency!

Rittal now offer customers an optional efficiency package to determine and display the energy consumption in a RiMatrix S standardized data centre via the power usage effectiveness (PUE) value.

Installed in the sub-distribution or enclosure suites, the PUE efficiency package for the RiMatrix S is hardware and software that gives IT administrators information on efficiency values in the data centre quickly and simply. Presentation of the results and their preparation is performed in the Rittal RiZone data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) software.

Consisting of intelligent socket systems (Power Distribution Units), instruments for measuring power consumption and the RiZone DCIM software, this optional package allows administrators to easily optimise the efficiency and energy consumption in the RiMatrix S.

RiMatrix is a complete data centre portfolio comprising of standardised components: a defined number of TS IT server and network racks, climate control, power supply and backup systems, as well as monitoring systems. Together, these form a complete server module. By concentrating on standardised data centre modules and ideally coordinated components, the RiMatrix S achieves an extremely low value up to 1.15.

Supervising fermentation in champagne tanks!

Veuve Clicquot is a French champagne house known the world over. Founded in 1772, this prestigious house is now a subsidiary of LVMH. Its reputation is no accident. The house does not compromise on quality and its motto is 'Only one quality – the finest'. In order to ensure that it always makes the finest champagne, it also needs to be able to closely supervise its production systems.

Champagne producer Veuve Clicquot chooses PcVue to supervise its tanks

That is why, in late 2012, Veuve Clicquot revamped its fermentation cellar supervision system. The fermentation cellars are where the house makes its wine from harvested and pressed grapes. Supervising the tanks in which alcoholic and malolactic fermentation take place is crucial. However, the software being used by Veuve Clicquot was at the end of its life and the producer was no longer supporting it. It was therefore necessary that the house replace its 10-year-old supervision system by a more recent and better performing solution.

"We needed to replace it by a lasting solution that would be supported for many years to come," says Franck Berruyer, sales engineer at Arc Informatique, the company behind the PcVue supervision system installed at Veuve Clicquot.

"In addition to various technical factors, we chose the PcVue 10 software suite because of the relationship of trust we have maintained with Arc Informatique and because the cost of the licences is economically suited to Veuve Clicquot's needs," says Stéphane Fournier, manager of SF2I, the company that developed and integrated the supervision software. Another advantage of PcVue is that it has the same HMI as the previous software, meaning that the operators were able to use PcVue immediately. Furthermore, Guy Jendryka, manager of the electricity, automation and industrial computing department at Veuve Clicquot, stresses that one of PcVue's strengths is that it is easy to adjust and program. "With the previous system, you really had to be an IT specialist to be able to upgrade the software. PcVue is much easier to modify as needed."

The development architecture is based on PcVue objects and greatly facilitated the supervision software's design. Because Veuve Clicquot's fermentation cellars contain 400 tanks of various types and volumes (50 hl to 725 hl), the developers had to be able to use models so as to reduce programming, and hence maintenance times. Depending on their type, the tanks are fitted with up to three temperature-control sensors and manual or automatic valves. The application manages some 40 variables per tank for a total of 16,000! "The object development architecture saves time and simplifies operations. Once the model was made for the dozen existing tank models, it was simply a matter of instantiating the objects and automatically generating the communication variables," says Mr Fournier.

With its virtual architecture, PcVue runs on a server that is installed in a secure, air-conditioned and filtered room protected from the damp. The application's maintainability and portability on new physical machines is thus simplified. The fact that, in such a virtualised environment, the software is decoupled from the hardware means that reinstallation and commissioning times in the event of failure are considerably reduced.

The operators control the PcVue supervision
software via a 42" touch screen installed at the
entrance to the fermentation cellars.

Five web-based clients allow the cellar managers to view the supervision system and select its setpoints via their PC. Operators can also monitor and control the software via a 42" touch screen that is installed in the lobby and within view of all visitors. The software communicates with the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) over a Modbus TCP/IP network while a VPN (virtual private network) link is used to collect information from the tanks in the house's other fermentation cellars. Fourteen fermentation modules are housed in the main cellar in Reims and four others are located in various towns across the Champagne vineyard at distances of 30 to 200 km from the main cellar! The VPN saves a tremendous amount of time. "Being able to supervise all our fermentation cellars from one place eliminates the need to drive to each cellar. The supervision system issues an alert if a serious temperature control issue crops up," says Stéphane Fournier.

Mr Jendryka can now monitor all his tanks from his desktop PC. "PcVue supervisor has made our fermentation cellars smart. We can monitor every aspect of temperature control from just one place."

Encouraged by this positive experience, Veuve Clicquot's technical teams quickly realised how PcVue could be used elsewhere. Not only does it supervise the fermentation of wine in the tanks, it also monitors the production of cold during cold stabilisation after final blending.

PcVue does not control these operations; it is used simply to view their settings and archive, log and track temperatures, faults and other data. It is also used for effluent monitoring purposes at the two treatment plants – it manages acid and sodium-hydroxide levels, tracks pH and flow-rate values (weekly dashboard report for Dreal, the regional directorate for the environment, land-use planning and housing) – and to e-mail resupply alerts to the managers when levels become low.

And that's not all! PcVue is being deployed to other areas of Veuve Clicquot's operations. By the end of the year it will be running on the wrapping line (placement of foil capsules and labels on bottles prior to shipment). "We are going to use it in particular to retrieve production orders from SAP and provide the laser ID to be affixed onto the glass and back-label," says Mr Jendryka.

Compact and low cost single output switching power supplies

The JSF series of single output enclosed switched mode power supplies from Stadium Power now offer a compact and low cost power supply with a high operating temperature up to 70°C for industrial, instrumentation, telecoms and IT systems.

The JSF series is available with output power ratings of 25W, 50W, 75W and 100W with a 3 year warranty.

Output voltage is specified as 3.3, 5, 9, 12, 15, 24 and 48VDC and all models offer a wide input voltage range (universal input voltage or user selectable voltage depending on model). Other key specifications include inrush current limit, over voltage protection and over current protection. All models meet international safety standards including UL, C-UL, CE, CB and comply with EMC standards EN55011/EN55022-B, FCC-B. Operating temperature range is -10 to +70°C and the power supplies will operate over the humidity range 20 to 90% RH (non-condensing).

Online orders are available for next day delivery from stocks held in Britain.