Meeting regulatory and industry standards drives more complex plants: advanced process licenses and catalysts, heat integration, power islanding, mixed energy sources including hydrogen readiness, carbon capture, closed-loop water, and pollution abatement. More process units mean more rotating and static equipment, which means more advanced process control and far more pervasive condition monitoring.
In a recent episode of The Main Column Podcast, Nithiya Parameswaran, Vice President of Product Management at Emerson’s Aspen Technology business, joined Lee Nichols, Editor-in-Chief of Hydrocarbon Processing, to explain how Asset Performance Management (APM) is moving beyond monitoring toward predictive and prescriptive maintenance.
North American infrastructure was not built for the load growth now arriving from data centers, and the top industrial turbine manufacturers are booked solid for the next two to five years. That leaves operators one practical option: get more out of the plants they already own, many of them past the 40-year mark.
Every extra alarm competes for an operator’s attention, and a flooded list buries the one message that actually matters. Standards such as ANSI/ISA 18.2 and IEC 62682 give you a framework, but the day-to-day work happens in the point configuration inside Ovation Developer Studio.
A healthy alarm program in remote operations centers is core to asset performance and starts with a sound alarm philosophy and guidelines, not with the configuration screen.
Tech transfer remains one of the slowest, most frustrating bottlenecks in life sciences manufacturing, often stretching across half a decade or more. In a recent Qualitalks podcast episode, Qualistery Managing Director Yan Kugel spoke with Emerson VP of Marketing and Experience Nikki Bishop about why these projects stall and what actually helps close the gaps.
Data center project teams face mounting pressure from higher thermal loads, the adoption of liquid cooling systems, growing integration points between equipment, and aggressive schedules that leave little room for rework. In this environment, measurement is no longer simply about monitoring performance. It provides the operational confidence needed to commission systems faster, validate readiness, and maintain uptime.
Energy costs often represent a significant portion of operating expenses in chemical plants. A well-developed energy management system can reduce a facility’s Energy Intensity Index by 5% to 8% by connecting measurement, analytics, control, and decision-making into a continuous improvement loop.
In a recent Emerson webinar, the NI team showed how Nigel AI now generates LabVIEW code and expands across the LabVIEW+ Suite to reduce the effort of spending hours researching hardware, developing acquisition code, and untangling projects inherited from someone else.
Inverter-based resources, or IBRs, now supply a growing share of grid capacity, yet they behave very differently from the synchronous machines that utilities have modeled for decades. Because they convert direct current (DC) to alternating current (AC) through power electronics, they lack the inherent inertia as they connect to the grid through power electronic converters rather than synchronous machines.
Plants often operate with measurement gaps that limit visibility into critical processes and assets. Organizations cannot improve what they do not measure, making accurate and accessible process data a foundational requirement for operational improvement.
Measurement instrumentation is what lets a mine speed up without losing control. Measure the right points, control the process better, and you can push output while still meeting safety and sustainability goals.
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