Yes, there are good, smart young engineers out there.

Today I came across this post from Jim Cahill at Emerson Process Management. Seems a young intern at Fisher Controls named Adam Reineke spent part of his summer on the job developing an "Energy Responsible Tool," a Web-based tool for calculating pneumatic energy used for instruments at steady state. Click on the link above for Jim's complete explanation.

A little late, however I just found out that now that John Berra has officially retired, Dr. Gunther Kegel has been elected the chairman of the Fieldbus Foundation Board of Directors.  John was chairman for 16 years – basically since the beginning.

Coming down to the end of one of those weeks where I feel like if I have to put one more thing in my brain, it might explode. Between Emerson Exchange and the Stuxnet virus, I've had trouble keeping up.

I imagine that by now most of you have at least received the June 2010 issue of Control magazine with its “Special Advertising Supplement” from Emerson Process Management promoting the new Human Centered Design S-Series control products.  Of course the biggest part of the announcement is CHARM. Some folks have indicated that the concept is not that radical since Europe has been using Remote I/O for many years – especially in Factory Automation and Batch Operations.

The holy grail for plant operators has always been the freedom to walk the plant, AND operate the plant with all the necessary tools at their fingertips, including control, asset management and the ability to see the big picture-- like the old fashioned "panel wall" some of us older folk grew up with.

The December issue of Control Magazine contained an article http://www.controlglobal.com/articles/2009/ProcessAnalyzersPlay0912.html of interest to automation professionals involved in data integration and as the title of this blog implies, that is Xi (pronounced “X-EYE”) as a new version of OPC.   As a process analyser professional, it interested me to see that this technology is initially believed to have significant impact to the PAT initiative and then two “minor” items in the associated sidebar explaining the technology a bit further caught my attention.

New Emerson Human Centered Design Institute Drives Ease of Use

Innovative product development process reverses the roles of technology and people

Yes, Virginia, there is life after Emerson Exchange. ARC Advisory Group is ramping up for a three-fer come next February--in Orlando. (Where else?)

Here's the news release:

ARC 2010 Orlando Forum to Co-Locate Multiple Programs in a Common Venue

http://www.emersonprocess.com/exchangelivenews 

Emerson announces the new DeltaV S-Series, live at 1:00 pm Eastern Time.