The modern production plant, just like a human body, takes in fuel that allows its muscles (machines) to move. Just as the fingers, eyes and ears provide feedback to the human brain, sensors – such as flowmeters or pressure and temperature sensors – are the senses that help to refine process performance.
Making sense of all this data requires a brain. The increasing use of digital measurement and sensing equipment, together with advanced data processing techniques and progressively capable computers, is creating what is effectively a ‘digital brain’.
The digitisation of industrial plants has opened the pathway for linking all the feedback we have from the various instruments through a growing range of physical and wireless networks. Linking all this feedback offers new opportunities for superior measurement and control, both operationally and for maintenance.
Read the full article in the May issue of DPA