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Recent Articles

Condition monitoring offers a whole new world of maintenance

Sheila Kennedy, contributing editor, says it's a new world for the maintenance profession.

Critical CMMS properties for mobile needs

David Berger, P.Eng., contributing editor, details critical CMMS properties for organizations on the move.

Not for knuckleheads

Emerging trends in compressed air systems range from more efficient compression and conditioning equipment to greater reliability with lower maintenance to improved product quality via cleaner, drier air.

Compressors in perfect harmony

Details on the controls that make compressors sing.

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White Papers: In Depth Research

Plant modeling: A first step to early verification of control systems
Posted: 05/19/2010
Today's control system engineers face competing design demands — increase embedded system performance and functionality without sacrificing quality or breaking the budget. It is difficult to meet these challenges using traditional design and verification approaches.

Without simulation, it is impossible to verify a control design until late in the development process when hardware prototypes become available. This is not an insurmountable problem for simpler designs with predictable system behavior, because there are fewer sources of error in simpler control algorithms — and those errors can often be resolved by tuning the controller on the hardware prototype.

Today's multidomain designs combine mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, control and embedded software components. For these systems, it is no longer practical to delay verification until late in the development process. As system complexity grows, the potential for errors and suboptimal designs increase. These problems are easiest to address when they are identified early in the development process. When design problems are discovered late, they are often expensive to correct and require time-consuming hardware fixes. In some cases the hardware simply cannot be changed late in the development process, resulting in a product that fails to meet its original specifications.

Acoustic Properties of Industrial Machinery
Author: Philadelphia Gear
Posted: 09/07/2006
The white paper covers five aspects of unwanted sound: sound generation, measurement and characteristics; environment and system characteristics and their affects; noise tolerance of personnel and equipment, including present regulations and controls; sound level expectations during spin test, load test and field operations, and methods for noise attenuation through gear design.

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