The continuous rise of industrial companies around the world makes also arises the demands for better quality and consistent products and latest designs while maintaining its competitive prices. Also, its techniques and strategies in manufacturing must be aligned with the use of various devices. Fortunately, there comes the industrial automation that can solve these needs and demands.
Industrial automation helps to increase the productivity of the company, gives the optimal operational cost, improve production quality, increase the safety level in the company and its operations and minimize the routine check-ups that can save time and effort on the part of the manufacturers.
Industrial Automation Engineering
This is the type of technology that uses various systems that include control processing and communications. According to EQUUSTEK.COM, engineering field uses the principles of mechanical engineering and integrate it with electrical and electronic circuits to create, test and manufacture computer-controlled and electrical-mechanical systems which become the essential components in the industrial aspects.
Equipment in the Industrial Automation
- Sensors and actuators- it converts the processed variables into either optical or electrical signals. Some of the sensors converted are temperature, velocity, and pressure.
- Industrial computers- also called programmable logic controllers (PLC), these can perform certain controlled functions.
- Human Machine Interface (HMI)- it uses technologies like Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) in controlling the process via online or program changing.
- Communication system- in the industrial automation, it has three types of buses that are used to generate and distribute other sensors, actuators and other control devices to each other.
Structure and Engineering of Industrial Automation
The structure of industrial automation consists of the sensor level, automation control level, supervision level, and enterprise level. Generally, its structure is like a pyramid model which means that in upper levels, the information is intensified while it gets thawed on the lower levels. Moreover, the information for a particular area can be obtained at the bottom level.
Sensor level
Also known as the process layer, sensor levels serve as the arms and eyes in an industrial process. This level uses sensors and actuators in getting the values of the handled variables in a periodical or constant way.
Automation control level
The control layer uses various industrial control devices like PC and DCS. In order to control the process, it applies implanted processors and PID control algorithms.
Supervision level
These levels get channel information and store them in a system database. The acquired data from control devices are displayed in the Human Machine Interface (HMI). This SCADA layer provides alarm indicating the process level along with the control variables and has special software in order to get data and communication protocols to be used in interacting with the field devices.
Enterprise-level
This level is in-charge in tasks like scheduling, product planning, orders, and sales.
