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Controls
and instrumentation is the fastest changing and developing area of engineering
services provided by Associated Engineering. The controls and instrumentation
design staff take a keen interest in staying at the forefront of their art and
constantly receive training in order to keep up to date. However, providing the
latest technology is tempered with the recognition that the control system designs
need to be proven and reliable. The following are examples of some of the technologies
that can be applied where their use is justified:
Associated Engineering installed one of the first control systems in western Canada
to be based on TCP/IP as the main communication protocol. This has given the company
a lead in identifying areas where Internet and Intranet technologies can be applied
to control systems. Primary areas include: - Process data
propagation either globally or to specific users
- Remote
system monitoring
- Operations and maintenance resources
- Operations and maintenance knowledge base
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Remote system maintenance and upgrading
- Maintenance and
inventory management
- Voice and video transmission
Currently most off-site telemetry is achieved using land-line
or radio communications. Use of the cell phone network has typically been prohibitively
expensive as the cellular network providers have used a connect time basis for
billing. Services are now being offered by cellular network providers for data
transmission based billing. For certain types of systems this "cellemetry"
may be a very cost effective alternative.
Associated Engineering can
analyse each case to determine the most appropriate control system architecture
and equipment. If cellular telemetry is preferred for all or part of a system,
this can be provided.
One rapidly developing area of controls and instrumentation is smart instrumentation.
These devices offer several advantages:
- They may combine
several process variables to provide corrected values.
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Self diagnostics and alarms can be built in.
- They may communicate
with each other and with the process controller over a common digital data highway
(field bus).
- The digital data highway also may allow for
re-spanning or calibrating the instruments while they are in service either remotely
or locally.
- They may provide data logging.
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They may indicate when a certain threshold is reached that flags that maintenance
is required.
These instruments and devices may be incorporated into the control
system if they are appropriate for the specific application.
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Instrumentation 
Advanced
