On Sunday I walked the length of the Nanjing Road Pedestrian Walkway, about 45 minutes round trip. Near one end of this upscale retail mall I came across a large crowd pressing its way into a huge Apple store.

It looked like the sort of crowd you'd expect the day they release a new iPhone model. The fist floor was filled with long tables set up with iPad, iPhone, and Mac demos. Downstairs was filled with counters where you could consult with technical associates about your Apple purchase.

Judging from the crowd at the store, and the number of iPhones and iPads I see on the street, in restaurants and on the trains, Apple’s growing influence is as big in China as it is in the US.

At the top of today’s business section of the English language China Daily, a headline proclaimed “Chinese manufacturers’ interest in innovation was fanned by Apple products, Shanghai Expo.”

In the story, China Daily’s Cai Jing reports “the popularity of the iPad and other Apple products has awakened Chinese manufacturers’ passion for creativity.” The news story also credits the recent Shanghai 2010 Expo as playing a role in boosting the area’s creative industry. Yang Jeiming, a product designer with his own company, says he constantly hears manufacturing clients tell him, “I want something as chic as an iPad.”

The article reports that Shanghai’s so-called creative industry employed 1.08 million people, mostly design professionals. These creative companies accounted for 10 percent of Shanghai’s GDP in 2010, according to the Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau.

Advertising and exhibition services achieved the highest growth rate (71.4 percent in 2010), followed by industrial design (25.2 percent). Higher growth is expected for both advertising and industrial design studios as a result of the economic problems in Europe and the US, which has prompted Chinese manufacturers to look to domestic markets to fill in for declining exports.

Wang Yang, a product designer in Shanghai, told the newspaper, “Since the outbreak of the global economic crisis in 2008, an increasing number of domestic manufacturers have asked us to improve the design and function of their product.”

A Drive for Higher Quality in the Domestic Market
Yesterday, I met with William Wu, General Manager of the Colormax equipment manufacturing plant in Wuxi, China. He has also seen an increase in business this year from Chinese manufacturers serving the domestic market. He said Chinese processors are purchasing higher-quality equipment, particularly loss-in-weight feeders, that can help them improve the quality of their end products.

Colormax is a K-Tron company that offers Chinese process industries an affordable combination of Western control technology and locally-produced mechanical components. Wu says China’s manufacturers are attracted to the higher Western standards Colormax follows in the quality of the equipment it makes, the level of service it offers and faster delivery times.

Quality in Food and Pharmaceutical Industries Through Automation
Today I met with William Tang, General Manager and Sales Director for China in K-Tron’s Shanghai office. He told me he is seeing a significant increase in interest from China’s food and pharmaceutical industries. “Quality through material handling automation is their priority,” he said, as they strive to meet higher government standards and win consumer confidence.

Tang said Chinese food and pharmaceutical manufacturers need to upgrade their material handling systems on a number of fronts. “They are replacing manual systems with automated conveying and feeding systems,” he said. “Automated conveying systems lessen the possibility of contamination,” he said, which is “a very important consideration.”

Tang said K-Tron’s gravimetric feeders are helping to upgrade the critical end-quality of Chinese food and pharmaceutical products, and the feeder controls provide validation of what went into the product.

Need to Earn Consumer Confidence Illustrated
The importance for Chinese manufacturers to win domestic consumer confidence was brought home to me in a very personal way when a Chinese friend took me to a nearby pharmacy. I wanted to buy a Chinese herbal remedy for cough and sore throat. I’m taking an antibiotic, but I’m leading workshops over the next three days and want to be sure I don’t lose my voice.

She recommended a bottle of heavy black syrup with 18 different herbs. The most important selling point, she said, is that the medicine is made in Hong Kong, not mainland China.

The remedy, by the way, tasted surprisingly good and seems to be helping. Wouldn’t it be a delicious remedy for the Chinese domestic industry, if with the help of Western feeding and conveying technology like K-Tron’s, China’s consumers start buying Chinese processed foods and medicines with confidence. And they are actually made in China.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

Air Products began pumping hydrogen generated from a California municipal wastewater treatment plant into fuel cell vehicles this month. In addition to generating hydrogen, the project also creates electricity and heat for the Orange County Sanitation District (OCSD) in Fountain Valley, CA.

Methane gas from the facility's wastewater treatment holding tanks enters a purification system and then feeds into a fuel cell where it is reformed to hydrogen. This fuel cell produces electricity for use at the OCSD facility. Hydrogen not used by the fuel cell in creating electricity to operate the facility is further purified to vehicle grade for automobile fuel cells. According to Air Products, the process will produce enough hydrogen to fuel 25 to 50 electric vehicles per day, plus generate 250 kilowatts of electricity for the plant.

Hydrogen from renewable sources is required to be in the mix in fueling stations in California. The project received partial funding from the United States Department of Energy and involved the OCSD, Air Products, FuelCell Energy (a fuel cell manufacturer), the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, the California Air Resources Board and the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

Air quality is a major issue in this Southern California region, and emissions are heavily regulated. The project seeks do demonstrate how power, heat and a transportation fuel with no emissions can be generated from a renewable source. Other feedstock sources such as agricultural, food, and brewery wastes and landfill gas can also use this technology.

Air Products is a global supplier of hydrogen and has been a leader in developing hydrogen fueling stations with more than 50 patents in hydrogen dispensing technology. Air Products has long served the huge industrial market for hydrogen, where it is used in refining crude oil, in treating metals, and to hydrogenate oils and fats in the food industry. Other important uses are found in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries and in the manufacture of semiconductors.

While many see hydrogen as the fuel of the future, it cannot compete economically today with the major hydrocarbon fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal. According to the National Energy Education Development Project (www.need.org), hydrogen from electrolysis is ten times more costly than natural gas and three times more costly than gasoline per Btu.

In a two-page white paper on hydrogen (download the PDF here), NEED explains that industry produces most of its hydrogen in a process called steam reforming, where high-temperature steam separates hydrogen from the carbon atoms in methane (CH4). While the NEED paper calls this the most cost effective way to produce hydrogen, it points out the downside is it uses fossil fuels both in the manufacturing process and as the heat source.

Unless, of course, the methane comes from wastewater. Then you've got a whole new equation, which is what Air Products hopes to demonstrate in Fountain Valley.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

The calendar says we're ten years into the new century, but so far things haven't felt much different from 1999. That could change soon. There's a good chance 2011 will mark the true beginning of a truly new age.

It took two decades for the 20th century to get up to full steam, and for the "roaring 20s" to launch a new age.  Known as the Jazz Age, the twenties set the stage for the technology-driven culmination of what historians call the Modern Age, an era of science and technology that started approximately with Johannes Gutenberg's printing press in 1436 and extended beyond the Postmodern 1950s and 60s, to include the Atomic Age, the Space Age, and the dawn of the Internet Age.

But since we're in the Internet Age, and things happen faster in Internet time, the 21st century's Next Age, whatever we call it, is likely to arrive sooner than expected. Here are just a few of the signs that the Next Age is here:

Moore's Law continues driving computing costs down, and that's driving everything smaller, lighter, faster, smarter and networked. Computers have gone from mainframe to mini to micro/PC to mobile. At Monaco Media Forum, Ericson CEO predicted 50 billion connected devices by 2020 and a truly "networked society." (See MMF 2010 Keynote on YouTube, "Internet 2.0: Mobile changes everything," by Hans Vestberg, President & CEO, Ericsson).

But it's not just people getting connected by the Internet. Where the numbers get really big--and really interesting to those of us in the industrial equipment business--is what has been called the Internet of Things. "The next big revolution that will happen is the Internet of things," Cisco Chief Technology Officer Padma Warrior said at the 2010 CTIA Wireless Trade Show in Las Vegas. She predicted 1 trillion connected devices by 2013.

Networked things in a process include sensors, which can monitor and report process status, actuators, which can trigger an action, and controllers. Actions based on an input from a sensor are turned into a command by a controller. An example from my world of process equipment would be a Smart Force Transducer (made smart by an on-board microprocessor) that sends a digital weight signal to a feeder controller (also dependent on a microprocessor), that controls the speed of a motor (the actuator) that turns the screws of a loss-in-weight feeder.

According to K-Tron CTO Jim Foley, one of the biggest gains yet to be realized by the Network of Things in the process industries will be in terms of feeder system support. "A big trend in industrial networking," Foley said, "has been the near-universal acceptance of Ethernet ." He said all the industrial network protocols are now able to run on top of Ethernet, which is very easy to connect to either within the factory or remotely. This offers the possibility of instant remote diagnostics and troubleshooting.

"We have the tools now," Foley said, "to provide remote support, and the advantages to our customers are obviously huge. The only thing missing is for processors to put in place the safeguards they feel necessary to grant our service people the access."

The Internet Age doesn't simply grow at an astounding pace: It keeps changing and morphing in entirely unpredicted ways. Its impact spreads from how we market and sell our products to how we service our customers. It transforms our society, our children, our employees and our customers.

When social media hit the Internet scene in the last decade, it so changed the landscape we gave it its own name, Web 2.0. Now, smart phones and their apps, followed closely by tablets and e-books, have once again transformed the Internet landscape. Today's Internet is more social than ever, highly search-driven, far more local in language and culture, and is moving far beyond the desktop. What does all this mean to industry?

In an article on CIO.com titled "The Internet of Things and the Cloud CIO of the Future," Bernard Golden, author of the best-selling "Virtualization for Dummies," wrote:

"The simple fact is that everyone — and that includes (perhaps especially includes) those of us in the technology industry — underestimates the growth of ever-cheaper computing devices. To quote one industry luminary, later hoisted on his own petard, Ken Olsen, "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." Olsen now is laughed at for such an attitude, but the fact is, for the reality of the market as he saw it at the time, it was completely appropriate. But he completely missed how the market exploded once the reduced cost of personal computing enabled entire new uses for computers…. Ken Olsen's example indicates that one is better served in keeping one's eyes on the horizon rather than the well-trod ground at one's feet."

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

Illustration: Where there's smoke there's fire by Russell Patterson

Having spent the last 35 years of my life immersed in a wide variety of aspects in the process measurement and control industry I was recently asked for a recommendation regarding a level control device that would be able to control a bin filling operation and be "safe".  What a soapbox I was handed. 

The powder and bulk solids industry seems as though it lags in adopting some technology, at least from an instrumentation standpoint.  However, it isn't just the risk averse nature of most powder and bulk processors, but it is that much instrumentation technology developed for use with liquids (80% of the overall measurement business in level measurement) does not cross over directly or seamlessly to powder and granular material level measurement.  It takes time to adapt technology for the challenges of bulk solids.

The same exists in the area of instrument "safety".  Driven by large legal and financial ramifications in the chemical and petrochemical area, as well as standards writing bodies such as the global IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), most "safety" related approaches are quickly developed and adopted in liquid oriented industries, such as chemical, petrochemical, pharmaceutical etc.  So when asked, I summarize the four levels of basic safety regarding the function or output of a level measurement or monitoring device.

I recently posted to the Just Level Expert blog the following list.  You might want to setup an RSS feed from that blog so you don't miss anything.

SAFEST: Material detection sensors certified to SIS and SIL according to IEC 61508 and 61511.  Refer to this White Paper to explain more about this safety level.  There are level indicators certified at this level, but primarily technology for liquid applications.  It's an interesting subject if you are involved with process safety.  Check it out.

SAFER: Self-validating level sensor technology that verifies its health and communicates it to you.  This is only available with rotary paddle technology for solids and doesn't eliminate moving parts, the drive motor, and comes at quite a hefty price tag.  Fail-Safe rotary paddle, RF and vibrating element devices are just as reliable and protect against many sensor failures, those that occur due to power disruptions.

SAFE: Material detection sensors that are FAIL-SAFE so the sensor output indicates an alarm if the power supply to the sensor fails.  Rotary paddle units offer the highest value with this capability, but make sure you ask specifically for a unit that has a fail-safe output on power failure.  RF and vibrating element sensors commonly provide this capability on a standard basis.

TAKING YOUR CHANCES: This is any material detection sensor that does not offer at least the SAFE level or above.  This is common with some brands of rotary paddle bin level indicators, proximity sensors and also with tilt switches and diaphragm switches.  Consider switching these out for the "SAFE" kind.

One final point, thinking about relying on your inventory level sensor for control?  Don't!  And don't take my word, listen to what the accident investigation report said regarding their findings and recommendations regarding the fuel depot explosion and fire late in 2005 that was estimated to cost 1 billion pounds (that's pounds sterling British currency).  You can read about that in an editorial column from September 2009.


Got a question?  Give us a call at 888-61LEVEL or 815-625-2224.  Email us at bluelevel@blueleveltechnologies.com.

When it comes to authentic branding, perhaps that earlier oil-spill icon, ExxonMobil, can teach BP a lesson. While the news this summer was focused on BP's massive spill, the Mickelson ExxonMobil Teachers Academy completed its fifth year of what the Wall Street Journal's William McGurn called "summer camp for science teachers."

Teachers from third through fifth grades came to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, NJ to learn how to become better teachers of math and science. About 2,600 teachers have attended the academy since 2005. Golfer Phil Mickelson is more than a celebrity name behind the project. According to McGurn, Mickelson has had a lifelong passion for math and science and even uses his understanding of vectors and probabilities to the advantage of his golf game.

McGurn has this to say about the future value of the academy:

Though there are few metrics about results, some outside research suggests that the training they receive is leading to increased use and frequency of math and science in the classrooms of academy alumni. Mr. Mickelson says it's a 15- to 20-year bet.

"It's hard to teach a subject when you don't feel good about it or lack confidence," [Mickelson] says. "We bring teachers on an all-expenses-paid trip… give them good instructors… treat them like professionals… by getting them excited about teaching science, we'll have more American kids excited about studying math and science."

Though 21 years have passed since the Exxon Valdez spilled its oil in Alaska, it is safe to assume that this event is known far more widely than these math and science sessions. But consider the cumulative effect of 2,600 grade school teachers changing the life direction of countless students. Consider the children who have (and will in the future) become excited about math and science because a teacher attended this program. Consider what it means to our communities and our companies when our youth become proficient in math and science, even if they never pursue a career as an engineer or scientist.

The Mickelson academy for grade school teachers is one of eight math and science programs listed on the ExxonMobil website. In terms of public good, which do you think will pay the greater reward? BP's declaration of green energy or ExxonMobil's energizing commitment to making math and science accessible to more children?

I'm guessing technology knowledge is the bigger issue for companies in the long run. People who don't understand what you do, or how you do it, can't appreciate the extraordinary efforts you take to make the stuff they consume.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

BP's oil-slicked black eye is an environmental disaster spawning a public relations nightmare that could further undercut public appreciation for how industries contribute to the public good.

As BP demonstrated, smiley-face PR doesn't work in the long run. They are reported to have spent $200 million just in the first two years of their "Beyond Petroleum" campaign launched in 2000. Their new green logo, together with a concerted advertising and PR campaign, was aimed at transforming their public persona from oil producer (British Petroleum) to lovable provider of green energy.

The campaign won awards from the advertising industry, but even before their infamous oil slick, the company wasn't buying much love in certain sectors. Long before the mega-spill they were mocked by the public chorus for "greenwashing." A January 14, 2008 Ad Age article (BP: Coloring Public Opinion?) noted, "The ongoing campaign raises the question of whether advertising -- as much as action -- can change public perception of a corporation like BP, which is engaged in the often dirty business of finding and producing energy."

Post-spill, the BP name (and logo) have lost whatever green sheen their $200 million down payment might have bought them. Maybe in the long run BP did industry leaders a favor in teaching that industries, like people, can't buy love.

In BP's "Beyond Petroleum" Branding Strategy Became an Epic Failure (June 2, 2010) Jim Gregory wrote, "Branding is all about creating alignment of your company's business processes with its corporate culture. British Petroleum (BP) provides a case in point of a brand that got way out front of its business process and culture to produce tremendous exposure to risk."

Gregory is founder and CEO of CoreBrand, a global brand strategy and communications firm based in Stamford, Connecticut.  The risk he cites might be termed the risk of the inauthentic brand. Bloggers warned long ago that you have to be committed to establishing an authentic voice in your online communication. For corporations that commitment needs to be backed by an authentic brand. As Gregory concludes, "Understanding one's brand in relation to its business and culture is critical for allocating budgets properly. More importantly, it should be a way of life for the management of any corporation."

How do you think industry can best portray itself in an environment ranging from indifferent to uninformed to hostile when it comes to anything industrial? If your company or industry has a success story to tell, send an email to don@porwderandbulk.com. We'll share your story here.

--About the art: the artistic take on the BP logo is by "mconner74" and is one of 1,231 entries submitted to a logo contest on LogoMyWay.com.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator