The Emerson Global Users Exchange has descended on Nashville\’s Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center at the end of October – and brought a record attendance of close to 2,900 with it. Country music was upstaged by the announcement of Emerson Process Management\’s Smart Energy Initiative. In a break from the traditional product announcements, spokespeople laid out the challenges regarding energy and emissions facing producers and then proceeded to discuss solutions and customer stories. This is a global program designed to combine Emerson\’s industrial energy expertise with advanced energy management technologies to enable customers to leverage more renewable fuels, lower energy costs and reduce emissions. Emerson\’s new Industrial Energy Group will specifically focus on modernizing and improving the performance of powerhouses, the on-site utilities that provide steam and electricity to power industrial operations, while also improving how the manufacturing process consumes energy. At the heart of Emerson\’s integrated technology platform is its \’True BTU\‘ technology, a patent-pending innovation for calculating the actual BTU values of fuel sources, which makes reliable energy production predictable and repeatable. Emerson\’s proprietary suite of software, combined with field control technologies, enables the powerhouse to interchangeably use the most available and affordable renewable or waste fuels – wood waste, food byproducts, animal waste, or manufacturing byproducts like petcoke or off-gases – to consistently create steam to power their operations. It also delivers 21st century combustion solutions for greater efficiency and reliability when using waste and other renewable fuels, which burn and deliver energy at variable and unpredictable rates. Further into this energy theme, Emerson introduced the Rosemount 708 Wireless Acoustic Transmitter. The transmitter helps processing plants significantly reduce their energy expenses and environmental impact by combining temperature measurement with acoustic \’listening\‘ that provides unparalleled visibility into the state of steam traps and pressure relief valves. The key word in this product announcement is \’wireless\‘. Emerson is handling wireless as just another enabling technology. At no point did anyone bring up the WirelessHart and ISA100 contentiousness. The company is just proceeding as though the debate is over and now it is time for products and solutions. Bob Karchnia noted that Emerson\’s Smart Wireless program has accumulated 6,100 installed networks with 580 million operating hours. One other significant product announcement was the addition of intrinsic safety technology to the company\’s CHARMs configurable I/O and electronic marshaling product line. Technology to note A technology to watch is field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips. Two product announcements have just come to my attention expanding FPGA technology to video platforms. Altera has combined its Cyclone IV FPGA technology with Eutecus\’s multi-core video analytics engine (MVE) intellectual property (IP) to produce high-throughput along with increased pixel precision detail for video surveillance. Teledyne DALSA introduced its next generation user programmable real-time image processing platform. The Xcelera-CL VX4 and Sapera APF deliver an FPGA-based vision processor and integrated graphical FPGA development environment. This user programmable FPGA technology enables users to adopt vision processors for a variety of high speed, computing intensive, real-time image processing applications. This is definitely a technology to watch.
Manufacturing Connection
