Design

Waymon Armstrong, ECS CEO/President, announced that Engineering & Computer Simulations (ECS) will provide its Emergency Management Staff Trainer (EMST) to any local, state, or federal government agency at no charge, beginning on 1st June, the official start of the hurricane season, to assist with hurricane preparedness training during these challenging times.

According to figures published by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), up to nine percent of waste in the processed food sector can be attributed to machinery performance problems. Food manufacturing is a notoriously wasteful sector. Here, Lee Sullivan, Regional Manager at COPA-DATA UK, explains how manufacturers can use digital tools to tackle the issue. 

Bentley Systems has announced it has opened up its ProjectWise 365 cloud service, including waiving subscription fees through 30th September, 2020, to virtually connect engineering ecosystems working from home.

Why hasn’t the practice of using a Digital Twin been more widely adopted? Simple; because it can be complicated to implement and costly to maintain. But, just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. Guest blog written by Jeff Gowan.

With increasing regulation across all industries, from data privacy legislation to technical specifications and product certification requirements, consistent traceability within often large and complex supply chains has never been more important for businesses to achieve. This is not only for compliance reasons, but also to ensure accurate forecasting so companies can deliver on promises made to customers. 

The introduction of 5G promises great things not just for personal mobile communications, but also for business and importantly - plant automation. Carl Nash, technical director at Products4Automation, examines the use case for 5G in a SCADA context - looking at how it can pave the way for increased performance and greater functionality in plant automation, with simpler implementation than traditional wireless networks.

In May of 2019, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced its 100% acquisition of ICONICS. It is a US-headquartered global automation software provider of advanced web-enabled OPC UA and BACnet certified visualisation, analytics, mobile, and IoT software solutions for any energy, manufacturing, industrial or building automation applications.

Mitsubishi Electric is completing its range for robotics beginners and cost-conscious users with the MELFA RV-8CRL articulated arm model, which will be shown for the first time in Europe at SPS 2019. This robot is an addition to the RH-CH Series SCARA robots, which also cater for low-to-medium complexity applications.

Student teams from Plymouth University and Brunel University London have been crowned champions of this year’s Design Challenge, organised by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers to encourage young engineers to develop their technical and design skills.

European Utility Week 2019, taking place in Paris, from 12–14 November, is the meeting point for key players in the Smart Energy sector, where the latest developments in the transition to a fully integrated, low-carbon energy ecosystem will be revealed and discussed. Analog Devices (ADI), on stand Q130 in the Utility Week Exhibition, will showcase the special expertise its technologies can contribute in areas such as smart metering, power quality analysis, and energy storage.