Emerson (Emerson Electric)
Machinery : Process Technology : General
Emerson’s two core business platforms — Automation Solutions and Commercial & Residential Solutions — allow us to identify and confront the challenges of an increasingly complex and unpredictable marketplace from a position of strength, driving near- and long-term value as a trusted partner for our customers.
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Emerson Electric Bids to Buy National Instruments for Nearly $7 Billion
Emerson, a St. Louis-based technology and engineering company, said it was offering $53 a share in cash for National Instruments, which it said represents an enterprise value of $7.6 billion. The offer represents a 32% premium over National Instruments’ closing price from last Thursday, the day before the Texas-based equipment and instrumentation company said its board was evaluating strategic alternatives and had already been approached by potential acquirers.
ZEDEDA and Emerson Expand Relationship to Modernize the Industrial Edge
ZEDEDA, the leader in edge orchestration, today announced a strategic investment from Emerson Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Emerson (NYSE: EMR), a global technology, software and automation leader. The move extends the relationship between the two companies, as Emerson is also a ZEDEDA customer.
Emerson’s solution integrates ZEDEDA’s edge management and orchestration offer into its DeltaV™ automation system, enabling Emerson customers to extend DeltaV to the distributed edge. This expansion will deliver enhanced OT solutions while also continuing into the IT environment, providing software-defined automation and revolutionizing how customers can deploy and connect workloads within their distributed environments.
Control systems evolve to meet enterprise and operational needs
For decades, selection of plant control and reliability technologies was frequently a matter of convenience. Individual plants across an organization selected technology based on price and local technical preference, often resulting in a wide variety of technologies across the enterprise. At the time, such decisions were convenient, reliable, and cost-effective. However, new, modern technologies — coupled with the need for increased sustainability and market agility — have changed the paradigm, driving a shift in the way engineers design automation solutions.
As the many layers of the Purdue model of industrial engineering have flattened in the cloud and edge computing age, connectivity has become more important. Today, forward-thinking process manufacturers are making automation decisions with an enterprise IT mindset, moving away from a collection of local systems to a single system that is deployed everywhere. In doing so, they unlock the capacity for improved data democratization, fleet optimization, and improved personnel productivity.
Blackstone, Emerson Electric Strike $14 Billion Buyout Deal
Emerson Electric Co. is selling a majority stake in its climate-technologies business to Blackstone Inc. in a transformational deal for the industrial company that would value the unit at $14 billion including debt and mark the biggest private-equity buyout in months at a time when such activity has been choked off by market volatility.
The deal, announced Monday, would give Blackstone a 55% stake in the unit, which sells compressors and other HVAC products and services used in commercial and residential heating and cooling as well as cold storage. Emerson would retain a 45% stake.
Digital transformation tools improve plant sustainability and maintenance
Maintenance is inherent to all industrial facilities. In pneumatic systems, valves wear out over time, causing leakage that leads to excessive compressed air consumption. Some systems can have many valves, which can make identifying a faulty one challenging. Leak troubleshooting can be time-consuming and, with the ongoing labor shortage and skills gap, maintenance personnel may already be stretched thin. There may not be enough staff to keep up with what must be done, and historical knowledge may not exist. When production must stop for repairs, it can be very expensive. For mid-sized food and beverage facilities, unplanned downtime costs around $30,000 per hour.
Detecting dangerous gases to improve safety and reduce emissions
The primary advantage of differential optical absorption spectroscopy is its scalability. Two elements are required: a calibrated light source tuned to emit a specific wavelength, and a receiver able to read the same wavelength. In some cases, the receiver must also read a reference source for comparison. The two elements can be within the same housing to function as a point detector, but the source and receiver can also be separated, sending a beam across an open path, looking for a cloud of the target gas to move into its field of view.
New Ultrasonic Welder Mode Uses Real-time Adjustments to Improve Welds
Ultrasonic welding, including the single-parameter weld modes, let electronics manufacturers meet high levels of assembly quality, especially for products built from rigid, molded plastic components. But companies that assemble products from components with more dimensional, flexural, or material-related variability have faced a tougher challenge, one typically met by in-house modifications to ultrasonic welding equipment.
To use a welder equipped with dynamic mode, operators select the single-parameter weld mode that provides the best application results to date. Then, they enter two application-specific “scores,” which act as limits for dynamic mode activity. The first is a material “density” score that characterizes the hardness or resistance of the material that is to receive the welded, staked, or inserted part. Low density scores equate to harder, more resistant materials. The second, the “reactivity” score, affects the reaction time needed to get the desired density setting. In operation, dynamic mode monitors each weld cycle, using the density and reactivity limits to adjust and improve the cycle in response to specific part-to-part variabilities throughout the production run.
Gaining an Edge on Line Control
Edge control provides access to real time OEE and information visualization that changes the value calculation. With edge control, end-users can easily tie together existing equipment, other legacy controllers and new external sensing. The combined raw data can be analyzed at the edge to generate information needed by operators to take fast informed action, and it is the foundation for more advanced production line integration, with the ultimate goal of insight-driven and adaptive operation.
Evolving control systems are key to improved performance
For decades, the control system was constrained by physical hardware: hardwired input/output (I/O) layouts, connected controllers and structured architectures including dedicated networks and server configurations. Now, the lower cost of processing power and sensing, the evolution of network and wireless infrastructure, and distributed architectures (including the cloud) are unlocking new opportunities in control systems. Additionally, emerging standards for plug-and-produce, such as advanced physical layer (APL) and modular type package (MTP) interfaces, will drive significant changes in the way plants design and use control systems over the next decade.
How Augmented Reality Became a Serious Tool for Manufacturing
Making monsters appear in games like Pokémon Go is not the only application for augmented reality these days. Industry is using the technology too, harnessing CAD data for training workers, standardizing workflows, and enabling collaboration.
Sensor Fusion: The Swiss Army Knife of Digitalization
With the proper communication protocols and network architecture in place, smart sensor technology and the data it provides can be the bulwark on which digital transformation is built.
If industrial control systems are the brains of a plant, then sensors are its eyes and ears. Simply put, without sensors there would be nothing for SCADA, DCS, or PLCs to respond to. That’s why increasingly intelligent or ‘smart’ sensors packing more onboard processing power, the ability to monitor new variables, and digital communication capabilities are playing such an important role in helping plant operators and enterprise level planners alike to see better and respond to problems with more finesse.
Industrial automation unites the best of OT and IT
As operational and information technology roles progressively overlap in the industrial automation space, a hybrid operational technology/information technology (OT/IT) solution becomes increasingly necessary.