Introduction to Industrial Automation - 2

Control System Training
Introduction to Industrial Automation

Classification: Restricted
Agenda
• Industries and their classification
• Introduction to Industrial Automation
• Process manufacturing- Oil and Gas Refinery
• Discrete manufacturing- Car Assembling Process
• Process manufacturing- Oil and Gas Refinery
• Industrial Automation
• Layers of automation
• Supervising and production control level

Industries and their Classification
• The following details can be told by looking at the industries.
• Size( Geographical Extent).
• Complexity of Operation.
• Type of Industry
• Assembling to Product.
• Raw material to Product/Products.
• How is the process done.
• Consequences of Failure.
• With a better understanding the following can be better explained,
• Quality and Quantity
• Efficiency in production
• Fail safe conditions
• Shutdown and consequences
• Value of industry and products

• Industries are generally classified based on how the final product is
manufactured/ produced, and they are as follows,
• Process Industries.
• Discrete Industries
• Discrete industries
• Discrete industry term for the manufacturing of finished products that
are distinct items capable of being easily counted, touched or seen. In
theory, a discrete product can be broken down at the end of its
lifecycle so its basic components can be recycled. An automobile is a
product of discrete manufacturing.
• Process industries
• In process industry, the product is created by using a formula or recipe
to refine raw ingredients and the final product cannot be broken down
to its basic components. Process manufacturing industries include
chemicals, food and beverage, gasoline, paint and pharmaceutical.

• Discrete manufacturing is all about assembling things, and making things
that are exact.
• The products are typically manufactured in individually defined lots.
• The sequence of work centers through production varying for each one of
these.
• Thus in discrete manufacturing, the product is made by sequential steps
made in the same process or by the same craftsman.
• Discrete manufacturing based on the production orders and products
change frequently from order to order.
• Discrete manufacturers are making a finished good that may have screws,
nuts, handles, etc. that can be taken apart and used on something else if
need be.
• In discrete manufacturing, the manufacturing floor works on shop orders to
build something. The individual products are easily identifiable.

Discrete Manufacturing- Car Assembling Process

• Process Manufacturing is when you have a product that requires a set of
processes to be finished, each process in turn has certain needs.
• Thus each process is separated from the other while planning and setting
the Manufacturing requirements to ensure that the individual processes
are better controlled and maintained if they are dealt separately.
• Process manufacturers build something that cannot be taken apart,
technically you can take the mix out of the container and reuse the
container, but you can’t take the ingredients out of the finished goods
produced.
• This makes process manufacturers ‘process’ or formula based.
• In process manufacturing, you can’t tell the difference between one
product and another.

Process Manufacturing- Oil and Gas Refinery

INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION
• When we look at both the above industries it becomes clear that lot of
complex processes have to be done with accuracy and precision.
• Thus it is going to be a labor intensive task if it’s a manually operated
industry.
• The risk for humans also rises in case of process industries due to the usage
of chemicals and the condition of parameters(temperature, pressure, flow,
etc..) which are controlled.
• Due to the above mentioned factors and other such factors, industries have
long been looking for alternative techniques where in the process can be
done accurately resulting in better quality of products as well as providing
safe work environment.
• This requirement led to the replacement of humans with various control
equipment's to control the process. This is called as industrial automation.

• Industrial Automation: Industrial Automation is a combination of two word
namely Industry and Automation.
• Industry: An industry is a group of manufacturers or businesses that
produce a particular kind of goods or services.
• Automation: The word Automation is derived from the Greek words
‘Auto’ and ‘Matos’ where auto means self while Matos means moving
which gives the meaning ‘self dictating’ or ‘a mechanism moved by itself’.
• Industrial automation can be defined as the use of set of technologies and
automatic control devices that result in the automatic operation and
control of industrial processes without significant human intervention and
achieving superior performance than manual control.

• To understand the above definition better let us look into an example of a
heat exchanger process commonly found in all industries.
• The heat exchanger is used to provide water at a defined higher
temperature.
• In most industries there is a requirement of hot water for various purposes
, in our case we will look at the supply of water to a number of cleaning
stations, where the water temperature needs to be kept constant in spite
of the demand.

Process: Steam and cold water are fed into a heat exchanger, where heat
from the steam is used to bring the cold water to the required working
temperature. A thermometer is used to measure the temperature of the
water from the process or exchanger.
•How would you maintain the water at the defined temperature irrespective
of the changes in the demand of water at outlet.
•If the temperature has to be maintained there should be a constant
monitoring of the thermometer and adjustment of the steam flow.
•This can be done by two ways : the earlier manual control and the
automated control.

• In manual control the temperature is observed by an operator who
adjusts the flow of steam into the heat exchanger to keep the water
flowing from the heat exchanger at the constant set temperature.
• In automatic control the output variable is sensed and the amplitude of
the output parameter is compared to the desired or set level and an
error signal is sent to controller and the corrective signal is sent to
control the process at desired condition.
•
In our case steam a temperature sensor is attached to the outlet pipe, it
senses the temperature of the water flowing. As the demand for hot
water increases or decreases, a change in the water temperature is
sensed and converted to an electrical signal, amplified, and sent to a
controller that evaluates the signal and sends a correction signal to an
actuator. The actuator adjusts the flow of steam to the heat exchanger to
keep the temperature of the water at its predetermined value.

• This is how the manual control to automated control changes occur in
the industries.
• The thermometer is replaced by a sensor which produces electrical
signal.
• The human response is provided by a controller.

ADVANTAGES OF INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION: The following are seen as the
advantages when industry is automated.
• High productivity: Automation of factory or manufacturing or
process plant improves production rate through a better control of
production. With manual control of the production line there is
always a requirement to have some down time to ensure effective
working of work force. Where as the automated control systems will
be able to work for long hours without compromising on accuracy.
Hence increased productivity and efficiency per hour of labor input.
• High Quality: The automation system performs operations with
greater conformity and uniformity to the quality specifications once
it is designed and programmed. Thus by using the automation
systems, industrial processes are controlled and monitored at all
stages in order to produce a qualitative end product.
•

• High flexibility: When making changes or upgrading task is done
humans require training but, robots can be programmed to do any
task. This makes the manufacturing process more flexible.
• High Information Accuracy: The automated systems are enabled
with easy data collection techniques, which allows us to collect key
production information, improve data accuracy, and reduce data
collection costs. This provides with the facts to make the right
decisions enabling in reducing waste and improving processes.
• High safety: Work environment is made safer by transferring the
workers from an on location role in the process to the supervising
role. The automated machines designed to work in the hazardous
environments and other extreme environments. Industrial
automation makes the production line safe for the employees by
deploying robots to handle hazardous conditions.
•

LAYERS OF AUTOMATION
Industrial automation can be complex in nature, they have large number of
devices working in synchronization with automation technologies. The
figure below describes the hierarchical arrangement of an automation
system.

 FIELD LEVEL
This is the lowest level of the automation hierarchy, which includes the field
devices like sensors and actuators. The main task of these field devices is to
transfer the data of processes and machines to the next higher level for
monitoring and analysis.
• Sensors convert the real time parameters like temperature, pressure,
flow, level, etc into electrical signals. The sensor data is transferred to
the controller to monitor and analyze the real time parameters. Sensors
include thermocouple, proximity sensors, RTDs, flow meters, etc.
• Actuators converts the electrical signals from the controllers into
mechanical means to control the processes. Flow control valves,
solenoid valves, pneumatic actuators, relays, DC motors and servo
motors are the examples of actuators.

 CONTROL LEVEL
• The control level consists of various automation devices like CNC machines,
PLCs, DCSs, etc., which acquires the process parameters from various
sensors. The automatic controllers drive the actuators based on the
processed sensor signals and program or control technique.
• Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are the most widely used robust
industrial controllers which are capable of delivering automatic control
functions based on inputs from sensors and the programs downloaded into
the PLC.
• DCS is the advanced or more integrated controller used for large process
industries.

SUPERVISING AND PRODUCTION CONTROL LEVEL
• In this level, automatic devices and monitoring system facilitates, the
continuous viewing (supervising) of the process and also provides for
controlling and intervening functions like Human Machine Interface (HMI).
• These systems enable supervising various parameters, setting production
targets, historical archiving, setting machine start and shutdown, etc.
• Mostly, either Distribution Control System (DCS) or Supervisory Control and
Data Acquisition (SCADA) and HMIs are popularly used in this level.

INFORMATION OR ENTERPRISE LEVEL
• This is the top most level of the industrial automation which manages the
whole automation system. The tasks of this level include production
planning, customer and market analysis, orders and sales, etc. So it deals
more with commercial activities and less with technical aspects.
• Industrial communication networks are most prominent in industrial
automation systems, they transfer the information from one level to the
other. So these are present in all the levels of automation system to
provide continuous flow of information. The communication network can
vary from one level to the other. Example of some of these networks
include RS485, CAN, DeviceNet, Foundation Field bus, Profibus, Ethernet
etc.

• In this hierarchy there is continuous information flow from high level to low
level and vice-versa. This can be represented in graphical way, like a
pyramid in which as we go up, the information gets aggregated and while
going down, we get detailed information about the process.

Topics to be covered in the next session:
• History of Industrial Automation
• Types of Industrial Automation
• Process Industries
• Overview of Continuous & Batch Process

Thank you!

Introduction to Industrial Automation - 2

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