Process engineers in control? They should be
15 Jan 2000
Last month was a special one in the life of the Institution of Chemical Engineers. In a week packed full of special events, conferences and celebratory dinners (see p26), the IChemE marked its double jubilee in some style, and with some cause. It is 75 years since the founding of the institution by the man generally held to be the progenitor of the profession of chemical engineering, George Davis; and it is 40 years since the IChemE was awarded its Royal Charter.
Other professions and their institutions have longer pedigrees, of course (and a happy 150th anniversary to the IMechE, by the way), but few can match the contributions that chemical and process engineers have made to industry in particular and modern society in general. The IChemE's slogan for its excellent educational jubilee CD-ROM is `Chemical engineering: one profession, many careers'. Any reader of Process Engineering - IChemE member or not - knows the truth of that, irrespective of his or her rOle in their own particular industry.
Moving on now to this month, there is another opportunity to sample the breadth of technology that process engineers use in their day-to-day life. Or rather, two opportunites, as visitors to the NEC in Birmingham (from 13 to 16 May) migrate between the Process Engineering 97 and the Control & Instrumentation Europe exhibitions in Hall 5.
As the official catalogue in this issue demonstrates, PE 97 is very much a `hardware' show, with a good cross-section of the pumps, valves, mixers and other equipment with which process engineers are so familar. Alongside it, however, the C&I show takes on more and more the appearance of a `software' show - particularly this year as Microsoft makes its mark on the control scene (see p67).
The speed at which the control companies are embracing the Windows platforms, particularly NT, is remarkable. Remember, this is an industry that has agonised for nearly a decade over which fieldbus protocol to adopt so that the process industries can `go digital'. Yet, here we are, a mere 18 months since the OPC Foundation was formed, being routinely amazed by the apparent simplicity of `plug and play' Windows-based control systems (see p35).
The operative word here, though, has to be `apparent'. Configuring the software side of a control system may now be almost child's play, but we shouldn't lose sight of just what the system is there for - to control a process so that it operates, safely and efficiently, to its design parameters. And who sets those parameters? Process engineers, of course.
