Pillar to Post: Peter Welander's Blog
News and comment from Control Engineering process industries editor, Peter Welander
Testing Toyota
I have been following some of the discussions related to Toyotas lately. (In the interests of full disclosure, my wife drives a 2008 Prius and my daughter drives a 2008 Matrix. My wife is out of town at the moment, so I drove the Prius to work this morning. I did give a quick inspection to the floor mat and all seemed fine. I’ve driven it enough to think the concept of “rapid acceler ...... Read More
Comments (0)More on wireless interoperability
One of the comparisons I’ve been hearing about ISA100 is that it’s similar to adoption of 4-20 mA as a communication platform. While 4-20 mA has never completely eclipsed all other analog protocols, it certainly is dominant. Back when it was made into a standard, various companies began to look at what they could do to expand on it. There were several protocols developed to put addit ...... Read More
Comments (1)Wireless interoperability? What is that?
Last week I was at the ARC Advisory Group conference in Orlando. While my wife was home shoveling snow, I was trying to get a grasp on some of the issues related to wireless field device networks. (For the record, the weather in Florida was pretty crummy.) One term that keeps coming up is interoperability. At the moment, the two main contenders for the field device space are WirelessHART and ISA10 ...... Read More
Comments (0)PID trials and errors
After working on the story Understanding Derivative in PID Control with Vance VanDoren, I was interested in some extensive comments from Larry Trammell, a software engineer in Bellevue, WA. He apparently took issue with one of Vance’s comments in the article sidebar about early work on PID control development. He said, in part, “Ziegler and Nichols did not ‘discover by trial a ...... Read More
Comments (0)Has gasoline consumption peaked?
We know that gasoline consumption has gone down lately due to recessionary pressures, but now some experts believe it will never return to the heady days of 2007. We may look back at that time as the year gasoline consumption peaked in the U.S. An article from McClatchy news service suggests three reasons: • New vehicles are more fuel efficient; • The number of cars on the road has r ...... Read More
Comments (0)Know your alternative gasses
In my discussion of home producer gas appliances, Kevin Chisholm pointed out that I had misused some terminology in the interest of trying to add variety to my prose. (Such is a hazard in this business, and I have been called on it a few times before.) In the headline I used the term bio-gas to refer to the product from the wood gasification process. While this does describe what wood gas is since ...... Read More
Comments (0)Your next home appliance: bio-gas generator
Last Sunday, Joe gave me the results of some searching he’d done on the Internet about wood gas generators. (We discuss this topic frequently, and I keep telling him that I can’t believe he’s never dabbled in it given all his other interests.) Anyhow, apparently there’s a company in China that manufactures a commercially built wood gas generator with the catchy name JXQ ...... Read More
Comments (0)Your next home appliance: bio-gas generator
Last Sunday, Joe gave me the results of some searching he’d done on the Internet about wood gas generators. (We discuss this topic frequently, and I keep telling him that I can’t believe he’s never dabbled in it given all his other interests.) Anyhow, apparently there’s a company in China that manufactures a commercially built wood gas generator with the catchy name JXQ ...... Read More
Comments (0)Hazards of repeating gray science
The United Nations has suffered some embarrassment over a report issued by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The benchmark report, issued in 2007 under the leadership of Rajendra Pachauri, made the rather alarming claim that the Earth’s glaciers are melting so quickly that they will disappear completely in the Himalayas as early as 2035. The embarrassing part isn’ ...... Read More
Comments (0)Rising sugar prices: Food vs. fuel?
If you think your mid-afternoon sugar boost is getting more expensive, you’re probably right. Sugar costs have been rising for a while and are getting to levels not seen an almost 30 years. Needless to say, this affects products like candy immediately and directly. Confectionary prices are up almost 10% over this time last year. Raw sugar on world markets is up by 42% over January 2009, and ...... Read More
Comments (0)Want a nuke plant? Call Korea
You’ll be forgiven if you don’t know that KEPCO (Korean Electric Power Company) is the world’s third largest nuclear plant builder, but the name is likely to become far more recognizable in years to come. KEPCO just beat its two main competitors (GE/Hitachi and Areva) to get a $20 billion contract related to four new Generation-3 APR-1400 reactors in the United Arab Emirates. ...... Read More
Comments (1)Coal troubles: As if carbon isn't bad enough
In what is a real-life example of “pick your poison,” coal-burning power plants are dealing with a choice of spewing out sulfur dioxide that results in acid rain, or mercury that contaminates fish and causes birth defects. We won’t even get onto the topic of carbon emissions. This is manifest in rising levels of mercury in a number of mid-western states, including Illinois, th ...... Read More
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