by Gary Mintchell | Oct 3, 2022 | News, Organizations
I can’t remember the date of my first visit to a Festo facility in Germany. I do remember being impressed with what engineers can do with pneumatics—a technology that I mistakenly thought at the time was at a dead end. Far from it. And Festo keeps growing. Especially in the US. I’ve visited one campus in the US, since I used to live close to the Mason, Ohio area. This news emphasizes 50 years of growth in the US for Festo.
- The Festo Mason, Ohio, Campus will be the site of a Global Production Center and expanded Technology Engineering Center.
- Festo U.S. celebrates its 50th anniversary year
- Announces expansion plans for its 47-acre campus in Mason, Ohio. A new production facility and the expanded research and development center will be dedicated to U.S.-centric automation components, systems, and solutions. Festo, a $3 billion family-owned company, is a global innovation leader in pneumatic and electric automation systems.
- The campus, 30 miles north of Cincinnati, will be the site of a new Festo Global Production Center (GPC), the designation for the company’s most advanced automated manufacturing facilities. The GPC will focus on flexible automation in a direct response to Festo customers who want custom solutions that serve to maximize performance and differentiate their machines and systems from the competition.
- The Mason campus is also the location of the newly expanded Festo Technology Engineering Center (TEC).
- Festo Didactic North America recently relocated to the Mason facility. Festo Didactic supports educators, educational institutions, and industries to develop the workforce of today and tomorrow through both hands-on and digital learning experiences.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 30, 2022 | Data Management, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software
Many industrial software companies have been connecting with Microsoft Azure services. This release from HighByte reveals its latest version expanding connectivity.
- HighByte announced the release of HighByte Intelligence Hub version 2.5 that expands connectivity to Microsoft Azure services, including Azure IoT Edge and Azure IoT Central, and the ability to import DTDL models from Azure Digital Twins.
- The release also includes support for Active Directory, data source monitoring and alarming, flow performance metrics, and more.
- The Intelligence Hub version 2.5 improves the ability to monitor the health of data pipelines with several new capabilities, including the ability to monitor and alert when data is bad or stale and when flow performance is poor.
- The latest release also allows administrators to manage authentication and authorization of users through Active Directory and application settings through the user interface for simpler management, enhanced controls and monitoring, and improved security.
- The PI System connector now includes support for PI compression as well as the ability to configure the PI source when creating PI points.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 30, 2022 | Automation, Security
Cybersecurity news continues to lead inputs to my inbox. Tenable has much news coming. This one has been waiting for a while for me to clear a lot of other news. This is an update to Tenable.ot to v3.14.
Four new capabilities in Tenable.ot
1. Deeper coverage of segmented assets — Active Sensors queries devices that are otherwise invisible to passive scanners — even if they are in a separate, isolated or non-routable network.
2. New sensor management capabilities — New sensor management capabilities provide better control and context to make the best security decisions. You can even deploy sensors on virtual machines and manage them through a single interface.
3. Consolidated global dashboard reporting — Enhanced global dashboard reporting helps security teams quickly gather telemetry from across the OT environment. User-configurable widgets make it easy to group assets by type, events, policies and risk scores. Security teams can efficiently identify high-risk assets and communicate risk effectively so executives can make informed decisions on business initiatives.
4. In-product signature and detection feed — The signature and detection feed assures you’re running the latest plugins.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 30, 2022 | Automation, News, Process Control, Technology
The large process automation suppliers are racing for leadership in green hydrogen production. You could search hydrogen on the blog to see the latest news. This one updates a new initiative by ABB Ventures.
- ABB and Hydrogen Optimized announced a collaboration that positions companies for global leadership in large-scale green hydrogen production systems.
- Combined technological offerings will include Hydrogen Optimized’s RuggedCell high-power water electrolyzers and ABB’s high-power rectifiers.
- The two companies consolidated their alliance with a new commercial agreement signed at a hydrogen trade show in Stephenville, Newfoundland, attended by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
- This includes an investment by ABB into Key DH Technologies Inc. (KEY), the parent company of HOI
- Global electrolyzer capacity will reach an estimated 3,100 gigawatts by 2050, according to a June 2022 report published by DNV. The group forecasts that electricity-based green hydrogen will be the dominant form of hydrogen production by the middle of this century, accounting for 72 percent of output.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 29, 2022 | Automation, Networking
Advanced Physical Layer (APL) for Ethernet generated much hype for quite some time. Product may be coming your way before too long.
After almost 4 years of close and fruitful collaboration among the four leading standards development organizations, FieldComm Group, ODVA, OPC Foundation, and PROFIBUS & PROFINET International (PI), combined with significant support from 12 major industry project partners, the participants are pleased to announce a successful completion of the APL Project. The result is a completely available 10Mbit technology for a new two-wire, Intrinsically Safe Physical Layer called Ethernet-APL.
The main results of the APL Project are port profile specifications to create the Ethernet-APL solution for multiple power levels with and without explosion hazardous area protection, engineering guidelines and best practices for planning and installation, and conformance test specifications and test tools. As a single physical layer, Ethernet-APL supports EtherNet/IP, HART-IP, OPC UA, PROFINET, or any other higher-level network protocol.
The APL Project has also worked with semiconductor manufacturers to bring 10BASE-T1L Phy chipsets for Ethernet-APL to market.
BASF and Procter & Gamble have demonstrated that Ethernet-APL has very good suitability for use in process applications through their internal testing.
