Jim is a 38-year veteran in industrial automation with Emerson and leads Emerson's global social marketing practice. He is the chief blogger of Emerson Automation Experts. Jim received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas and an MBA at the University of New Orleans. He began his career as a systems engineer for Conoco's offshore oil & gas production operations, based in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Refineries are pushing outages out as far as possible, so improvements that need a process penetration often wait on a wish list until the next turnaround. Every new penetration can add installation complexity, safety reviews, a potential leak path, and future maintenance requirements.
Ovation 4.0 moves the platform onto current Microsoft operating systems and database technology with long support horizons. It also delivers a long list of small engineering improvements that remove repetitive clicks and workarounds.
AspenTech Inmation™ OT Data Fabric is designed to unify, contextualize, and govern OT data from edge to enterprise and cloud. WebStudio, its web application environment, turns that data into the dashboards and business applications people use every day.
An approach that combines expanded sensing, lifecycle digital twins, a comprehensive data fabric, and AI-enabled automation to create an operational foundation where AI can support modernization, optimization, decision-making, and increasingly autonomous operations.
Physical AI uses vision and object detection models that adapt to what they see and feed results back to the control system in real time. For automation engineers, that makes closed-loop quality control at the machine practical.
When that information is scattered across email threads, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools, engineers spend valuable time searching for answers. SystemLink connects test data with the systems, assets, software, and workflows that generated it, giving teams the context they need to answer questions in minutes instead of hours.
Steam supports sterilization, heating, clean utilities, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), so a single failed trap can waste energy continuously. Finding failures early protects product quality while cutting fuel use, emissions, and maintenance cost.
In this video podcast, we explore how advanced control techniques like model predictive control (MPC), data fabric architectures, and AI-assisted operations can optimize cooling systems, improve uptime, and manage highly dynamic AI workloads more efficiently.
Flare systems must handle many possible emergencies, and each scenario drives decisions on valve sizes, header diameters, knockout drum capacity, and materials of construction. When relief loads are estimated without accounting for how the process actually responds during an upset, safety equipment tends to be overdesigned, which raises capital expenditures (CAPEX).
Cooling is the backbone of any data center, and Tier 3 and Tier 4 facilities run it through parallel loops. Isolation valves let operators take a pump, chiller, or air handler offline while cooling continues through an alternate path. Valve pressure drop also adds to pump load and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), so these choices compound across a facility.
AI workloads are pushing rack densities to 100 kilowatts per rack or more, and the liquid cooling loops that support them add complexity that commercial meters were not built to handle. Any service interruption carries significant financial consequences through service-level agreement penalties. In some AI-focused facilities, cooling accounts for roughly 30 to 40% of total facility energy use, so measurement accuracy directly affects both cost and uptime.
Unlike large continuous plants, specialty chemical sites often make many products with frequent changeovers, so flexibility, speed, and quality control matter more. Off-spec batches must be downgraded, reworked, or scrapped, and a missing feedstock discovered mid-campaign can be a major loss. Safety risks from toxic, hazardous, and flammable materials are present every day. Accurate, reliable measurement gives engineers the data they need to manage all these pressures at once.
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This blog features expert perspectives from Emerson's automation professionals on industry trends, technologies, and best practices. The information shared here is intended to inform and educate our global community of users and partners.