IT Jan 2008 - Industrial Technology Magazine

In Their View...
Three industry heavyweights air their views on the key topics of the
moment. You can have your say, too, via feedback@itmagazine.uk.com
Serving two masters
We all know that running a profitable business
isn’t easy, and for some years climate change
considerations have made it even more
difficult. But now the Climate Change Bill requires that
we address both of these simultaneously. The
imperative to make money remains, but now there is a
need to show equal aptitude at reducing carbon. In truth
very few companies are prioritising carbon reduction in
their development plans and very few business
managers list carbon as a high priority, although a few
talk about cost saving through energy efficiency.
Critically, most business managers today are concerned
far more with financial success than carbon reduction.
The disciplines required for maintaining profitability
in competitive markets oblige companies to focus on
the short-medium term. They find it very hard to look
more than a year or two ahead. An investment that
will pay back handsomely in five years is very much a
dent in the bottom line for the preceding four years.
Politicians, on the other hand, love the long-term.
They know that their life at the top of the
governmental tree is probably going to be about five
years. They think it makes them look good if they set
grand ten year targets and they can leave the detailed
implementation up to their successors.
Resolving this to its simplest form we see that
carbon reduction is required for the long term
continuance of the human race, but this is transformed
in a free market economy into energy management
driven by economic criteria. These two approaches are
in fact fundamentally different, but currently
coincident. Left to their own devices they will drift
apart again relatively soon.
The European Energy Trading Scheme should allow
investors to realise a return on expenditure in low
carbon technologies, but the problem is that its
sophisticated economic analysis requires a
commitment to long term investments. Large parts of
an open economy do not do these things: small
businesses, low margin operators and rapidly growing
markets are going to be very hard to get on side.
Jeff Whiting
Energy Spokesman
Mitsubishi Electric
The death of the PLC
Both inverter and servo technologies appear to
be near the limit of their design capabilities,
but the final refinements will in fact improve
their performance levels considerably. The twin holy
grails of inverter design are full regenerative capability
and zero harmonics. Both are possible, but neither is
commercially viable in standard drive systems at
present. However both are within reach.
The great gains for servo drives will come in the
form of far greater dynamic responsiveness, because we
can confidently expect that processing speed of the
controlling electronics will increase at least four fold over
the coming years. Equally important, prices will drop
significantly and user-friendliness will reach levels such
that a servo can be installed and programmed by a
relatively unskilled person in a matter of minutes. This
will open up whole new fields of applications of servos.
Both servos and inverters will become very much
more intelligent that they currently are. The technology
for achieving this already exists, we are just waiting for
the market to appreciate the fact and start using it.
Interestingly this will reduce the need for local
controllers such as PLCs and we can forecast that
PLCs will have to adapt. It is realistic to consider that
large and medium PLCs will either disappear
altogether or evolve into something just about
unrecognisable from today’s stand point. Small PLCs
will actually fare better; they will become smaller with
fewer I/O because there will be greater reliance on
remote and distributed I/O. The small PLCs will
perform a higher functionality processing, physically
connecting different parts of a control system together.
In a parallel development, some PLCs will
become ‘soft PLCs’, software programs that function
like a physical PLC. To date determinism has been an
issue, but it seems obvious to me that it is not beyond
the wit of programmers to build adequate determinism
into their industrial control programs. The fact that
they have not done this yet does not indicate that it is
impossible, simply that so far they have been paid
more money to concentrate on other areas.
Stuart Harvey
Managing Director
Silverteam
Forgotten heroes
Mechanical engineers will be at the forefront of
all the most important technical and scientific
developments for the next fifty years. Yet for
some reason they are the forgotten heroes – the
backroom boys who never step up to the limelight to
receive praise for their contributions.
I can understand people wanting to avoid the public
gaze, but if there is no recognition of engineers’
contribution, there can be no general appreciation of
their efforts. It’s little wonder that kids are not enthused
to go into engineering careers. If we are not constantly
nurturing the next generation of engineers, I wonder
what will become of the national economy.
Nearly all fields of human endeavour require an
element of mechanical engineering. Yet how many
mechanical engineers today achieve the celebrity status
of geneticist Prof Sir Robert Winston, historian Michael
Sharma, architect Norman Foster, retailer Philip Green,
businessman Richard Branson?
Perhaps we should merge engineering with
entertainment – engitainment if you will – and push TV
executives to create a couple of ‘celebrity engineers’.
They’d be more entertainer than engineer, but perhaps
they would do for technology what celebrity chefs have
done for British cuisine. There are precedents, too:
Stephenson and Brunell, Barnes-Wallis and Whittle, who
in their day were embraced by the public. And we are
nearly there now with TV programmes like The Great
Egg Race and Scrapheap Challenge. We just need to
shift the balance slightly more towards appreciating the
technology and the engineers.
If we are to solve many of the problems facing the
human race, mechanical engineers will have to play a
major role. Mechanical engineers created the industrial
revolution, enabled global trade in Victorian times,
created a new world order for the Edwardians, led the
development of aircraft and the push into space. Their
role today and tomorrow is just as vital and a little more
recognition would be appropriate and would
undoubtedly help secure some economic certainty for
the future.
Ray Barnes
Managing Director
Hoerbiger-Origa
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INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY • January 2008