7 / 36
5
Chemical Technology • September 2016
CONTROL AND INSTRUMENTATION
A
s she wakes up, she sends an SMS to the tour
guide to ask him to have a look at the tempera-
ture gauges on the fermentation tanks. We then
spend a few hours waiting for him to bother stepping
out of his office and check, and send them back to her.
This is the difference between a quiet weekend, or her
getting in the car to drive an hour and find out why the
fermentation process has crashed.
While sensor technology has advanced significantly over
the past few years, permitting an ever-expanding plethora
of telemetry to be gathered and aggregated, most people
working in industrial environments don’t get to use it. That
can be for a variety of reasons but, often, it’s simply that the
plant equipment is old and doesn’t require replacing. The
underlying technology either hasn’t changed much or was
built as a piece of infrastructure meant to last indefinitely.
It can be impractical to lay cable through an old smelter
even as safety and efficiency could be improved through
the availability of a little extra telemetry. Sterile manufac-
turing environments don’t get much benefit from workmen
traipsing through drilling holes through which to run cable.
Not that engineers won’t be engineers when exposed to
new technology.
The first ever internet-connected device was a Coke
machine at Carnegie Mellon University which was stocked
and run by graduate students. In 1982, they installed
micro-switches to assess the state of the machine: when
it had been filled, how long individual bottles had been in
the fridge, and which column was empty. The output was
wired to a server and people could ping the device to get
an update.
In 1992, the machine was overhauled and connected
Beyond sensors
to the Industrial
Internet of Things
by Gavin Chait
Weekends are less peaceful since my wife started making beer. The equipment
at the brewery is almost a century old and belongs to a farm and farmers who
make their own beer, and run weddings and tours.