It All Starts With Sensors

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Introduction
Sensor technology is at the heart of any manufacturing data collection, especially for the digital stream—it all starts with sensors—but there is so much more. Sensors need connections to instruments, and some actions need predictions; the process is sensing, connection, and predicting. Sensing assumes sensors. Connecting can be any intelligent device that provides a program or signal conditioning and then makes that data available to the rest of the organization. Predicting is the difficult step.

The Smart process needs to be implemented immediately. Time does not favor the procrastinator. Assign or hire an engineer who has the tools and creativity to make digitization work, let them gain the new training that may be required, and just do it.

Sensor Training Options
My background is chemical engineering, and we spent a lot of time learning about sensors, control systems, and chemical unit operations.

In my college days of the mid-1960s, basic industrial sensors included:

• Electrical measurements
• Displacement and area measurements
• Pressure measurements
• Flow measures
• Measurement of temperature
• Thermal and transport properties
• Force, torque, and strain
• Motion and vibration
• Thermal and nuclear radiation measurements

Later, in graduate school, I took a course titled “Instrumental Methods of Chemical Analysis.” This was a DIY course that required us to build 22 analytical devices and their electronics from a LEGO brick-like set of optical and mechanical components that snapped together. This course covered a wide variety of topics, including spectroscopy, chromatography, radiation absorption, and polarimetry, to name a few. I learned that sensor systems can lend themselves to DIY approaches.

Continue reading this article which appears in the August 2023 issue of SMT007 Magazine.