An exciting development in industrial instrumentation is the WirelessHART radio communication standard,…
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I remember first learning about the world-wide Internet, and wondering what it actually looked like. The first…
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These fortifications focus on human behavior rather than system design or component selection. In some ways…
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Cyber-security seems to have its own vocabulary, ranging from unwieldy technical acronyms to slang terms…
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There are multiple motives for compromising the security of an industrial control system, some of which…
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At the next OSI Reference Model layer (layer 4) is a set of protocols specifying how reliable communication…
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In the United States, the ANSI and IEEE organizations have standardized a set of numerical codes referring to…
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A design-based fortification is one rooted in technical details of system architecture and functionality. Some…
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A bridge circuit is basically a pair of voltage dividers where the circuit output is taken as the difference…
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In a manually-controlled process, a human operator directly actuates some form of final control element…
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Every programmable logic controller must have some means of receiving and interpreting signals from real-world…
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Light has long been used as a long-range signaling medium. While communication by light through open air is…
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Programmable logic controllers are essentially nothing more than special-purpose, industrial computers. As…
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Developed by the Modicon company (the original manufacturer of the Programmable Logic Controller, or PLC) in…
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Many years ago, when I was first learning about electricity, I happened to discover a length of coaxial…
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An engineer named Bob Metcalfe conceived the idea of Ethernet in 1973, while working for the Xerox research…
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Imagine a major marathon race, where hundreds of runners gather in one place to compete. When the starting gun…
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The vast majority of PID controllers in service today are digital in nature. Microprocessors executing PID…
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One of the great benefits of digital technology is the ability to communicate vast amounts of information over…
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A completely different way of measuring liquid level in vessels is to bounce a traveling wave off the surface…
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The majority of flowmeter technologies operate on the principle of interpreting fluid flow based on the…
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So far we have just looked at instruments that sense, control, and influence process variables. Transmitters,…
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Modern DC and AC motor drives provide features useful when using electric motors as final control elements.…
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Self-balancing pneumatic instrument mechanisms are very similar to negative-feedback operational amplifier…
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PID control can be a confusing concept to understand. Here, a brief summary of each term within PID (P. I, and…
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The digital multimeter (DMM) is quite possibly the most useful tool in the instrument technician’s…
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In addition to directly performing logic functions, electromechanical relays may also be used as interposing…
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The dispersion of visible light into its constituent colors goes all the way back to the 17th century with…
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The simple PLC ladder diagram (LD) commands consist of contacts and coils, arranged in sequences that mimic…
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There are several different methods useful for causing an AC induction motor to brake, or slow down: DC…
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Once while working as an instrument technician in an aluminum foundry, a mechanic asked me what it was that I…
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A very simple device used to measure pressure is the manometer: a fluid-filled tube where an applied gas…
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An extremely important topic in engineering is that of transfer functions. Simply defined, a transfer function…
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In contrast to quantitative tuning procedures where definite numerical values for P, I, and D controller…
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“Feedforward” is a rather under-used control strategy capable of managing a great many types of…
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First, let us review some of the properties of differentials and derivatives, referencing the expression and…
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Several different technologies exist for the conversion of fluid pressure into an electrical signal response.…
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Fluid pressure exerts force on any surface area it contacts, as described by the formula \(F = PA\). One…
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A different strategy for controlling the flow of fluid is to insert a rotary element into the flow path.…
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Learning from reading printed text is a kind of problem-solving activity it is own right. The problem is how…
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