Handy resources for instrumentation engineers

If you're responsible for day-to-day care and feeding of process instrumentation and sensors, here are two simple but useful resources to make your life easier.

By Peter Welander September 9, 2009

If you’re an instrument engineer or plant maintenance technician that’s creating and managing instrumentation specifications, the ISA-20 Instrument Forms Plus LITE database management system can help you to do it faster, easier, and more accurately.

Instrument Forms Plus LITE provides ISA-TR20.00.01 specification forms in a database management system format that includes tag lists and file utilities. The forms include operating parameter forms to define an instrument’s process parameters, and instrument specification forms covering:
• Valves;
• Regulator devices;
• Pressure and differential pressure;
• Level;
• Flow; and
• Temperature instruments.

Drop-down field edits simplify data entry by offering pre-programmed choices, and user-defined values may also be easily added and edited. An instrument tag table lists the tag numbers along with the assigned specification and parameter form.

While you’re at it, take a look at Sensor Performance and Reliability by H. M. Hashemian. This handy reference will help you understand how you can objectively assess the accuracy, response time, residual life, and other characteristics of installed instrumentation, while offering practical means to identify problems, assess their consequences, and find solutions.

The text reviews the operational characteristics of industrial temperature and pressure sensors and typical problems that many plants have experienced with these sensors over the years. More importantly, this book describes methods that have been developed in recent years to measure the performance of process sensors and verify their health and reliability. It provides applications in a number of industries such as power, chemical, aerospace, and others. In-situ methods for sensor response time testing and calibration, on-line measurements to identify blockages and voids in pressure sensing lines, and other common problem situations are covered.

Visit the ISA bookstore.

 

-Edited by Peter Welander, process industries editor, PWelander@cfemedia.com,
Control Engineering Process Instrumentation & Sensors Monthly
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