ISIS or Oracle
What has the opening of the £200 million second target station (TS2) at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's ISIS pulsed neutron source got to do with plant engineers? More than most mere mortals - apart, that is, from the world's scientific community, currently descending on the place. Because not only will this major achievement enable new engineering understanding, by opening our eyes to atomic interactions like never before, but the entire station is another feat of extreme plant endeavour, not dissimilar to CERN's Large Hadron Collider (Plant Engineer, November/December 2008).
Motor Madness
Man enough, simple and lowest cost have been the rules of thumb for specifying electric motors on plant. Brian Tinham explains how the guidelines are changing
Compressed energy
Electric motors use two-thirds of all electricity consumed by industry, so any technology capable of cutting this drain on resources has got to be a good thing. Yet, despite proven and significant savings from variable speed drives (VSDs) - particularly on fan and pump control duties - they are still installed only on a tiny minority of applications.
Control freak
Let's talk about drives, motors and controls - no, not just the technologies for linear or rotational motion control, important though those are, but also control engineering in, for example, transportation, the process sector and the utilities. Why? Because there's quite a lot happening that could make a difference to plant engineers specifying, installing, commissioning and maintaining all of this stuff.
Cut the energy hype
Although oil prices have come down, the recession is forcing organisations of all kinds to keep on cutting energy costs. One consequence is increasing numbers of companies seeing energy saving as a business opportunity - and hence the growing number of ferings available. But while most ideas are good and very workable, others, inevitably, are either naïve or downright fraudulent.
Driven world
Unless you're heavily involved in project work, chances are your experience of drives, motors and controls is wide - after all, it's bread and butter stuff - but not as wide as it could be. So a quick update would be useful. Especially if it turned out that you could be saving time and money, and/or improving plant controls.