Smart Sensors: challenges and opportunities - Instrumentation for smart plant

Production industries – oil, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food & beverage, energy, water treatment... – use instrumentation and control technology to comply with regulatory requirements, ensure the quality of manufactured products, and meet production targets (deadlines, costs, quantities). In the industrial world, these instrumentation and control technologies are the most rapidly evolving, compared to mechanical engineering, for example.

Over the last few decades, control technology has benefited from technological advances in digital electronics and communication technologies. These developments are now reflected in our sensors, and should be deployed in the years to come.

The aim of this article is to shed some light on the evolution of so-called "conventional" instrumentation (communicating via a generally electrical signal that is the image of a measured quantity) towards intelligent instrumentation (communicating bidirectionally via a digital network).

The topics covered in this article include digital techniques and technologies (acquisition, processing and communication), technical norms and standards, organizational changes to be considered, skills to be acquired and prospects for exploiting the data generated by these sensors. This article is based on our own experience and that of the manufacturers we work with.

It goes without saying that the information in this article reflects the situation at the time of writing and is subject to change.