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Continuous Process Challenges Controls Retrofit Team
 Rendering is the process of recycling waste animal tissue into stable materials that are used as ingredients in making livestock and pet rations and other products. Upgrades to a rendering plant are particularly challenging because the plant receives a continuous stream of waste tissue from processing plants that has nowhere else to go.
When a Kentucky rendering plant retained certified control system integrator Integrity Integration Resources (I2R) to design and implement a replacement control system, I2R project managers knew they had their work cut out for them. Employees work two shifts to process millions of pounds of tissue per week from multiple processing plants and there is no place to hold the raw material...
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Digital Diagnostics
Half of the respondents to a recent Automation World survey indicate that they do not use the smarts—the advanced diagnostics—available in their Hart and Foundation Fieldbus devices. The reasons: cost, complexity and training.
Manufacturing and production plant systems offer engineers endless opportunities for problem solving, both in system design and day-to-day operation. This is because no single element of a system remains perfect. Everything is dynamic, and a goodly percentage of the movement is in the wrong direction. This is where diagnostics come in. Problems have causes, and the aim of diagnosis is to identify causes. Nail the cause and you are well on the way to nailing the problem.
And this, in turn, is where the diagnostic capabilities built into smart Hart and Foundation Fieldbus instruments apply. Hart is a communication technology and standard promulgated by the Hart Communication Foundation (www.hartcomm.org), while Foundation Fieldbus is a network developed and promulgated by the Fieldbus Foundation (www.fieldbus.org)...
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Calculating a Return on Safety
 By crunching the numbers on project cost, overall equipment effectiveness, direct and indirect injury costs and capital asset depreciation, a new Web-based tool made available by Rockwell Automation helps calculate the annualized return on investment for safety integrated automation systems.
A long-held axiom in automation and control discussions across industries is that there are two things for which an ROI (return on investment) cannot be calculated. Those two things are: security and safety.
Given the announcement made at Rockwell Automation’s Safety Automation Forum on November 11, 2001, that axiom may need to drop further mention of safety...
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Partnership Produces Powerful Video Surveillance via FPGA
 Altera Corporation and Eutecus come together to offer a single-chip solution that performs video analytics at 1080 pixels and 30 frames per second (fps) resolution.
Highlighted in our January 2011 feature (Sourcing Tomorrow's Automation Innovations) as an innovation driver, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology is making more inroads into plant and factories with its ability to take on more control and processing task. This new offering combines Altera's Cyclone IV FPGA technology with Berkeley, Calif-based Eutecus's multi-core video analytics engine (MVE) intellectual property (IP) to produce a high-throughput of 60 Mega-pixels per/sec, along with...
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