OT -Chemical Mill Visit

I had the chance last week to work with the technicians in a local chemical mill. First thing I noticed when I went to the cal lab was an old Fisher pneumatic controller right next to a six month old Radar level transmitter. The mill had better than fifty years span of controls technology. It was loads of fun being back in industry for a day. I hope to get to do this type of visit more often. I learned quite a lot about equipment reliability, and maintenance in an engineers playground. The techs all mentioned the fact that whatever the engineers whims were dictated what new equipment they had to maintain. It is a big site, and there was almost everything from DeltaV to Honeywell, to Modicon.

Please don't ask about the products, they are veried, and only identifiable by product numbers. I'd rather not mention the name of the company too.

I am kind of surprised that there is still anyone around this neck of the woods that recognizes a Fisher pneumatic controller.

They still have about fifty or so in operation. They good thing about pneumatics, is that there is no spark possible with the signal. They had some of what they called "nasties." Stuff I would not want to be around very much.

I did some work in a grain processing facility a few years back, and they still had a bunch of Fisher P to P controllers in use. (I had never seen one) I told the guys they should probably be in a Controls Museum somewhere. We were actually changing out a bunch of these pneumatic controllers and installing a small DeltaV system with Foundation Fieldbus networked instrumentation.

Their technicians were completely in awe as they had just jumped light years (or at least 30-40 years) in technology during a one month project.

I had the 'pleasure' of working at a facility that was entirely run by pneumatic logic.
It was called 'Dreloba' (props to anyone that can find anything in english on the web about it).
I think it was 60s vintage and it was actually pretty ingenious in the fact it performed all and any kind of regular logic function and was completely explosion-proof. Even the motor starters were pneumatic!

Of course that meant EVERYTHING I worked on there was pneumatic so I guess I have a soft spot having spent so long messing with the stuff.