Peter Zornio, Emerson Process Management chief strategic officer, reviewed Emerson’s responses to two challenges it sees its customers facing in process industries–increasing complexity of systems coupled with less experienced employees.
Emerson’s responded a couple of years ago with its Human Centered Design initiative one part of which is that all products must pass a usability review before release. Another response to complexity was a device product called CHARMs that feature I/O on demand and enable electronic marshaling.
Customer Bryan Beyer, acid operations manager for Southern States Chemical, discussed how using CHARMs in his new greenfield sulphuric acid plant saved the company time and money in completing the project. He noted it achieved several results including reliability, smooth technology integration, easy to understand system for employees, smooth I/O configuration, simplified troubleshooting, wiring cost reduced by 50%, quicker and cheaper I/O additions (use of Ethernet was a plus here), and a wealth of production data now available from the system.
Zornio then announced an addition to the CHARMs family–intrinsically safe I/O. With a built-in intrinsically safe barrier, these devices (pictured here) will drastically reduce cabinet footprint required for an intrinsic safety installation, not to mention all the benefits of configurable I/O. These are designed for Zone 1, Zone 0 or Class 1 Div 1 installation.
Bob Karchnia, Rosemount vice president of technology, updated the press on the latest advances in the Smart Wireless program. There are now 6,100 networks installed that have accumulated 580 million operating hours. Emerson currently has 17 products released with 9 more coming during the next year.
A side note from a personal observation of the week so far–outside of a private conversation I had with Walt Boyes and Jose Gutierrez about the status of the ISA100 committee on wireless there was no other conversation at all during the entire conference about those standards issues. Only that there were products and applications working in industry.
That's an interesting observation about the absence of wireless standards conversatiions. When I interviewed Steve Sonnenberg last year in San Antonio he told me, "The wireless battle is over – and we won.". That seemed to be pretty true 12 months ago … but I am not so sure it is now.
I guess the best way to talk about the battle being over is to act as if it is over. Behind the scenes, I heard from a couple of "rabble rousers" that convergence is finally beginning to proceed in the ISA 100 committee. There will be ISA 100 radios and networks–primarily because Honeywell and Yokogawa are still developing for it. But as far as sensor networks are concerned, WirelessHart is rapidly gaining momentum.
Will you be at Automation Fair or SPS? Haven't seen you for a while. Hope all is well.
Thanks Gary, yes it has been a while. Hope you had a fruitful time at EmEx. Will be in Chicago for AF in a couple of weeks so look forward to seeing you then. Guess it won't be quite as warm as Orlando last year …