How will things get done 10 years from now?” This question has a two-pronged response: how will technology evolve, and how will it be maintained? It’s time to gaze into the crystal ball and forecast the future on both fronts.

Before we start, I need to paraphrase Bill Gates: “We tend to over predict what will be accomplished in the next two years and under predict what we will have done in 10 years.” With that in mind, how will industrial automation technology evolve over the next 10 years, and what will be cutting edge in 2020?
We will continue to have multiple...

I’ve recently returned from the ARC Forum, which took place Feb. 8 to 11 in Orlando, Fla., where about 500 industry pundits gathered to discuss the future of our industry and what trends are likely to have the biggest impact on the automation industry.

This was my first time at the event, and though the information exchanged was interesting, I did not find the majority of the presentations to be forward looking — there were exceptions, and they made the trip worthwhile, but most of the material consisted of how today’s technology was being used to solve typical plant...

One of the key differentiators of Foundation Fieldbus is that with its PID Function Block, it supports control in the field and, as a result, single loop integrity. This means that with Foundation Fieldbus, it is possible to maintain control at the last set point without a host system.

Implementing control in the field enables certain applications to be more efficient than with conventional instruments or control in the host. But, like all things, this also means some items need to be considered during the design process. Let’s start with those enablers first.

As we all know, if we do not have a reliable control system with availability as close as possible to 100 per cent, we quickly lose faith in the system and circumvent this with "jumpers," loops in manual and the like that defeat the purpose. The same is true for a fieldbus system. Heck, even "finicky" analyzers have a minimum acceptable availability of 95 per cent.

A key part of any control system is the infrastructure that carries the signals from the field devices to the controllers, because without signals there, will not be data on which to control nor a means to manipulate the final...

One of the challenges that Foundation Fieldbus has faced to date is the integration of motors and drives as end devices. This has been a significant shortcoming, since variable speed and variable frequency drives are being used more and more often in projects because, in many cases, they are more energy efficient than control valves and offer equal or better flow control. If the user chooses a variable drive, he then must choose some other protocol such as DeviceNet or Profibus DP, resulting in a system for which the user must support multiple protocols. This is not necessarily a bad thing...

There is lots of talk and coverage of industrial wireless technology in the trade press. Once again there are multiple camps at work; WirelessHART, OneWireless, the two industry standards camps and, of course, the ISA100 standard that is also under development, which both camps say they will fully support once it gets adopted.

One good thing about the ISA100 standard is that the group developing it is planning to support the ability for it to effectively "tunnel" other standard protocols through or over the ISA100 protocol. This tunneling means that once ISA100 is available, each of the...

There has been much talk over the years about the mounting of Fieldbus power conditioners and the need for redundancy in these components of the system.

The dilemma engineers face is the need to meet the area classification for the devices in the field while still providing not only sufficient power to have the maximum number of devices on a single segment but also to have the longest possible total cable length while still meeting the requirement of a minimum of 9-volts at each device.

The now-traditional way of managing a reliable bulk power supply is to mount the power supply...

Cable is a part of the control system we often take for granted. Nevertheless, it is one of the most critical components of any system. Not only is it normally the medium by which we transmit the signals and information we use for control, as the Physical Layer of the Open System Interconnect (OSI) model, it is also the one on which all the other layers build. Just a like it is impossible to build a plant without pipes, a facility without a Physical Layer cannot exist. Therefore, cable (or its equivalent for those fiber and wireless enthusiasts in the audience) is truly the component that...