Foresight to benefit

Sensor Review

ISSN: 0260-2288

Article publication date: 1 March 1998

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Citation

(1998), "Foresight to benefit", Sensor Review, Vol. 18 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/sr.1998.08718aab.006

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 1998, MCB UP Limited


Foresight to benefit

Foresight to benefit

The first report to come from the Sensors Action Group of the UK's Foresight Programme was launched last November at a one-day conference at the Institute of Physics, aimed at industrial management, instrumentation developers and researchers. Its objective was to highlight areas with greatest real development promise, to identify the necessary innovations and to explore ways in which such innovations can be promoted, so as to stimulate new initiatives with particular emphasis on collaborative action between industry, the science base and Government.

The report itself, "Sensing the future", makes several recommendations, among them:

  • Research programmes, both publicly and privately funded, should reflect the scientific research opportunities in areas with major growth potential, including "smart", flow, pressure, displacement, microengineered silicon, and the data management aspects of all areas of sensor technology.

  • Research Councils should further improve their mechanisms to encouragemultidisciplinary research. They should continue to seek ways to improve collaboration between themselves on sensors and other areas of multidisciplinary research.

  • The EPSRC should review the balance and co-ordination of the wide range of support for research in different sensor technologies.

  • The LINK scheme should be further strengthened and developed.

The conference sessions looked at business needs for instrumentation; new opportunities created by technology; innovation and European Community action; followed by a panel discussion. Professor Barry Jones of the Brunel Centre for Manufacturing Metrology introduced the technology impact session with a review of integrated technologies for miniature, distributed and intelligent instrumentation. The technical scope for instrumentation, he said, is immense. At present over 100 properties can be detected by sensors and almost 200 technology areas are being applied to sensor developments. Back in the mid-1980s over 100,000 commercially available sensors were identified worldwide. The number of papers on sensor technology has doubled since 1990 to well over 4,000 in 1997.

There is an abundance of knowledge available for industry, but unfortunately, said Professor Jones, the science base in UK industries is now crumbling through lack of investment in staff and equipment during a period of rapid and under-financed expansion in student numbers. The new INTErSECT Faraday Partnership (reported elsewhere in this issue) is a welcome initiative: the DTI ought now to provide some matching financial support to help linkage with small and medium enterprises.

Frank McKenna, who runs his own consulting company FMcK Associates Ltd, talked about the concept of sensor fusion ­ the combination of information from several sensors to compute a non-measurable parameter. An example is mass flow of a gas where temperature, static pressure and volumetric flow may be combined to obtain mass flow. Currently this would be done in a flow computer remote from the primary instruments, an arrangement which can be prohibitively expensive. A simpler and less expensive approach to sensor fusion is offered by Fieldbus, in which several plant-mounted sensors and actuators share the same pair of wires, so that digital messages may be exchanged between plant mounted devices or broadcast to all, and devices may perform control and data processing.

McKenna drew attention to a recent draft of the ISA standard for programmable systems in safety related applications in which it was reported that the great majority of control system failures were in actuators and sensors. Improved self-diagnostic coverage should lead to equipment predicting failure and allowing maintenance to be on a just-in-time basis. The result would be a dramatic drop in maintenance costs and a probable increase in process availability. Primary candidates for this treatment are sensor blockage detection; control valve health monitoring; and pump/compressor health monitoring. The techniques for performing these functions have been known for some time, but they have only been cost effective in critical duties until now. Fieldbus changes all this. But much will depend on vendors agreeing to abide by a common Fieldbus protocol.

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