Stand in many an oil field and you will feel yourself transported back to the early 1970s. Despite past price crises and predictions of “peak oil”, little has changed in terms of measurement data acquisition, monitoring, and automation. Employees travel long distances every day; their most important tools are pen and clipboard. Yet efficiency can be significantly increased simply by equipping the measuring points with radio systems. This is the first step on the road to the digital oilfield, at the end of which lies greater added value. The principle of Open Process Automation provides future-proofing.

Air-Operated Double-Diaphragm (AODD) pumps can be used for numerous applications and their unique characteristics such as simple start-up, self-priming capability, overload-proof, etc make them all the more attractive amongst industry players.

Hydrowatt is presenting its radial pump portfolio at the trade fair. One of the product highlights at the show is the hermetically sealed radial piston pumps which have an integrated and extensible elastomeric sleeve.

Leaders from the process automation industry came together at the recently organized Namur meeting which was once again held as a virtual event this year. MTP, NOA, APL, and robots were the core topics discussed at the meeting. PROCESS has summarized the exciting two-day event.

In the past, “more is better” often applied to process optimization – companies sometimes invested considerable effort to keep all processes in the optimal range and suppress every disturbance. But not all anomalies in processes are equally relevant to the profitability of a plant. With artificial intelligence (AI) methods, events can now be directly evaluated for their business relevance, thus opening up new possibilities for companies in the economic optimization of processes.

The digitization train is picking up speed and many companies in the process industry have already jumped on board to gain a competitive edge through a deeper understanding of their production and a better overview of their various systems and locations. In this process, more and more companies are exploiting the fast and pragmatic approaches offered by open-source software. Automation experts, such as those from Wago Kontakttechnik, in a team with system integrators combine sensor systems, gateways, container applications and cloud computing to extract even more information from company processes.

Pfeiffer Vacuum has introduced new multi-stage roots pumps ACP 90 for oil- and particle free applications. The pumps prove beneficial for pumping large amounts of condensable gases like in drying applications, high humidity environments or large insulating volume pumping.

Specialty chemicals company Lanxess is taking on a mammoth task and digitalizing all its process engineering, electrical engineering and automation documentation — including lifecycle management. Uniform plant and project documentation and comprehensive data management will increase quality and efficiency in production and maintenance operations going forward.

IPCO pastillation systems make intermediate products easy to transport, store, handle and dose for manufacturers of cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and food products. Benefits include consistently sized pastilles, high hygiene standards and GMP compliance.

The new term prescriptive maintenance (RxM) is a mashup of prescriptive analytics and predictive maintenance. Both have been around for a long time. So is RxM new, or is it just a clever name? And whichever the case, how is it done? And what’s the difference between prescriptive and descriptive analytics, and anomaly detection?