If you are lucky, you will have played a part in specifying and
procuring the extruder. You will have spent time with the people
installing and commissioning it and have possession of all the manuals
and drawings. Unlucky? You have inherited the machine and its care as part of
your new job. Now you have to find or create drawings and manuals and
get to know your machine. At first look, it will be hard to imagine how
your wiring and piping drawings bear any relation to the actual
equipment.
At Hydro Quebec, James Bay, sits a
large body of water. In raw heat, it is equivalent to some 2,500 tons
of coal per hour, ready to be converted to electricity.
In previous columns, I have looked at how to compare energy costs and
touched only too briefly on the stages of refinement that energy can
undergo to improve its application.The subject of this column was prompted by a book, The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy,
by Peter W Huber and Mark P Wills. Although this is not a book review,
I must say this is a fascinating book: In some chapters, it is an
undisciplined ragbag of rich and heavy reading; in others, a model of
clarity and realistic analysis.
There was a time when a temperature controller had three pairs of
terminals: power input, temperature sensor and output. Three knobs were
on the front: proportional band, integral time and derivative time.
Wiring was easy and tuning procedures were not hard to master.
In year 2005, a typical 1/4 DIN controller comes densely packed with features.
A valuable contribution to this industry is putting together a tabular
presentation of controllers and their main features from all the
first-rank manufacturers. You are able to take in a great variety of
information at one glance. Here begins your quest for the simplest
product that meets your application. It’s not quite so satisfying as
looking and handling, but the many features listed give you a good look
in-depth at the specifications and features that matter to you.
As I noted in my previous column, the topic of the human factor in
industrial incidents has been covered extremely well in a book, The
Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live with Technology by
Kim Vicente. Vicente is a professor of human factors engineering at the
University of Toronto and a consultant to NASA, Microsoft, Nortel
Networks and many other organizations. He spends his time in emergency
rooms, airplane cockpits and nuclear power station control rooms -- as
well as in kitchens, garages and bathrooms -- observing how people
interact with technology.
Too often following a catastrophic event, an inquiry or inquest
concludes “human error,” and somebody is named. Our instinctive
reaction is to search for a person to blame when the finger should
rightly be pointing to the unrealistic complex actions expected from
that person. All too often, the answer lies in the neglect of the human
factor in the design of equipment, documentation and procedures.
by ArthurHolland | November 1, 2004 | Comments (0)
Continuing my discussion of how to check your heat process on a budget,
I’ll pick up with temperature sensors and shaft speeds. Again, let me
remind you: None of your tests must endanger the plant or its product.
Continuing my discussion of how to check your heat process on a budget,
I’ll pick up with how to check the control circuits of electric heaters
as well as how to manipulate test signals and analyze the results. I
also will be covering controllers, recorders and indicators. Again, let
me remind you: None of your tests must endanger the plant or its
product.
by ArthurHolland | September 1, 2004 | Comments (0)
