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Wireless Extends Instrumentation Boundaries
With this issue, Automation World is kicking off a new focused publication—Process Sensing & Instrumentation Review.
Dave Gehman, who has been the series contributing editor for the Wireless World Review, will be heading up this new project. He will be expanding his coverage of wireless—a key component of the future of instrumentation—with coverage of new developments in networks and diagnostics, sensing technologies and analytical products. Please contact him with your thoughts and ideas for coverage of this often under-reported part of automation.
While the industry failed to rally around a single wireless networking for instrumentation standard, there are only two. And, even better, companies are busily developing products so that engineers can implement them in the field. I've talked with several engineers who either have implemented wireless sensing networks or are planning to. All see great benefits to the technology... Read more
Industrial Wireless Mainstream Mostly
After a short but action-packed adolescence, wireless sensing and instrumentation seems to be entering a calm middle age.
As applied to process sensing and instrumentation, wireless technologies seem to have reached the threshold of a calm middle age. The adolescent struggles for identity, the academic fights, the mind-numbing cramming to learn new ways and means, the two-steps-forward-one-step-back learning curves, all are fading into a comfortable glow of success.
“So, where,” Bud Dungan asks, “has everyone been?” Dungan, President of Gastronics Inc., Bedford Heights, Ohio, began leading his company into its solid niche in wireless gas monitoring when wireless was nearly unknown in process settings. As an early convert to the technology, Dungan has worked his way through a number of radio technologies (and a number of listening post and network backbone schemes) since his first installation more than 12 years ago. His company's products are found in wastewater treatment, oil-and-gas production and processing, chemical production, and pulp and paper. Gastronics sensors detect chlorine, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, oxygen and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), as well as combustibility and flame
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