Smart moves

A combination of software and wireless technology developments is taking process control out into new large-scale and very small-scale applications. The technology of process control is escaping from the confines of factories and business sites and finding new uses in outdoor, distributed applications where continuous performance monitoring, diagnosis and control have all been difficult until now. And in very small-scale applications that simply could not have been done before. Behind this expansion of applications is a fundamental change: where measurement and control systems have traditionally been based on hardware and hard-wired instrumentation, the new systems are driven by software, have elements of inbuilt intelligence and communicate through wireless means. Along similar lines, and very much in the process control area, an early NI application for wireless sensors was in a US project growing algae in challenging desert conditions, where process monitoring was difficult and unpleasant.