Basics of industrial automation :

Industrial automation has grown today as a huge domain.

Why we need automation of process in industries ? first lets have a look at
the problems the industries are facing :
Disadvantages of traditional way of production (applies for all industries
eg : Power, oil and gas, pharmacetical, food etc )
Traditional methods use Man as resource in production of materials but
1) Today the demand for products is huge. The use of traditional manual efforts
in manufacturing industries will delay the production and hence, the overall
product quantity arrived to markets are less compared to demand for the product.
2) When manual efforts is made there also has inconsistency in quality of produc
t
for example of cholocate manufacturing : A man cannot always add the exact propo
rtion
of ingredients for production and hence, the quality (taste) will not be same at
all
time. There are many similar situations in many industries of different domains.
3) It is waste of money since in large industries there are many process for eg:

In automobile industry there are process like car body painting, spare parts fit
ting,
glass cutting, testing the manufactured car etc. so the outcome of all these pro
cess is
a car. The company needs to pay the wages to these men who handles the above pro
cess
as long as they stay in company whether they work or not. Most of the time the c
ompany
will have issues regarding salary paid to employees and employees may go on stri
ke,
again there is 100% possibility of stopping the production quantity and also qua
lity.
4) There are critical applications like boiler handling, here if man is used to
handle
boiler and if any critical situation occurs like steam pressure in boiler is hig
h, water
level is too high in boiler etc. Sometimes it will be difficult for a man to rec
ognize
these above situations and act. The boiler here is not only in danger situation
but also
the people who works near it, if boiler explodes then there may be death and sev
er injuries.
5) Company needs to keep track on how much it is producing and how much it is ca
pable
of producing to avoid lossed. And also company should be able to find out the ro
ot cause
if any failure or breakdown in process or plant occurs. Traditional method has n
o such
kind of superior technology.
There are many issues and concerns that an industry look at as mentioned above
to over come the above and many other problems, there should be less human inter
face.
There more the industrial process or tasks should be handled automatically witho
ut
humans this is known as automation.
Automation can be applied to any industries like power, oil and gas, food produc
tion etc
Obviously we need some electronic equipment which is driven by software. These s
pecial
electronic devices are known as Programmable logic controllers (PLC).
The process to be automated is directly or indirectly connected to plc, the plc
will
identify the status of process and incase of danger it will give command to proc
ess to
halt. Plc will not only monitor the process for failure but also decides when to
start
and stop the process, infact overall process handling can be done by plc.
To understand the status of process, on command, off command, plc requires input
s like
sensors, switches etc.
There are many different types of inputs to identify Metals, non-metals, water l
evel,
heat etc.
Sensors to identify metals are Inductive sensors,
non metals are capacitive sensors
measure heat is Thermocouple.
Based of needs of process there are further classification of the sensors.
An engineer will create an application to monitor these status mentioned above
that are fed to plc as inputs to stop, start, or control the process.
This tool used to create application is called as engineering tool.
Like C, C++, here in industrial automation there are different programming langu
ages
Like Ladder, Function blocks, Structured test, Sequential function chart. These
are
invented to help to create application quicker without much investing time on le
arning.
So, We can stop about plc right here and just explain how Industrial automation
benifits organization.
Advantages of Industrial automation.
It helps to avoid many manual efforts to increase production efficiency,
effective utilization of resources.
Saves lot of money.
Better return of investments.
Improve both quality and quantity.