Chemical Technology September 2016

CONTROL AND INSTRUMENTATION

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.

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

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Chemical Technology • September 2016