DAVENPORT, IA – MAY 16, 2022 – Allied Instrumentation was awarded a larger footprint with MSA Safety Inc. (MSA), expanding into the North-Central Midwest. Allied Instrumentation is a fast-growing process instrumentation solutions company representing best-in-class brands, and serving the Refining and Specialty Chemicals, Food and Beverage, Power, Natural Gas, and Biofuel Industries to name a few.

MSA is a global leader in the development, manufacture, and supply of safety products that protect people and facility infrastructures. Allied Instrumentation will represent the full MSA product line, including flame and gas detectors and IIoT gateways. The new territory includes the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

“This is a very exciting time for Allied Instrumentation. Our team members have an unmatched level of process industry expertise, and we are gratified to have partners like MSA who recognize that and are enthusiastic about growing with us”, said Kevin Scheibler, President of Allied Instrumentation. “Our goal from day one has been to provide our customers with worldclass expertise, products, and services. Our partnership with MSA will allow us to accomplish that mission and better serve our customers in the Northern Midwest.”

Allied Instrumentation is the parent company of Great Lakes Process Controls, JMI Instrument Co., Power Specialties, and Promac. Allied Instrumentation is also authorized to distribute MSA products in Kansas, Western Kentucky, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska.

Allied Instrumentation Capabilities Include:

• Procurement of process instrumentation including transmitters, flowmeters, heat-trace solutions, gas and flame detection, and wireless I/O devices
• Assistance with sizing and selection, and custom solutions
• Installation, calibration, and programming services
• Field commissioning service
• OEM and Manufacturing

Allied Instrumentation brings together a legacy of excellence that will better serve the needs of manufacturers and processing plants in the US.

Contact us with any questions you may have.
Download the Press Release

If you're like most plant managers, the words "flood" and "plant" do not go together very well. In a recent turn of events, a local steel plant had to face the fact that their basement had flooded, completely submerging a mix of 50 transmitters. 20 of the instruments were Yokogawa EJA/EJX DPharp transmitters.

The story goes that the steel plant had a large diameter service water line burst which flooded the basement with around 20 feet of water. When the issue was resolved and the basement was given some time to dry, it turned out that all 20 Yokogawa transmitters had completely survived the event. They did not even require calibration adjustments! What happened to the remaining competitor’s brand transmitters, you ask? They were no longer functioning at all and needed to be replaced. Only the Yokogawa transmitters were still working as if nothing had happened.

You might be wondering how this could be possible. After all, floods are no joke and usually result in serious damage to electrical equipment. Yokogawa pressure transmitters are built to withstand even the most extreme conditions, including being submerged in water for extended periods of time. Why? Here is what a representative from Yokogawa had to say:

“Yokogawa designed the EJA/EJX DPharp pressure transmitters with very tight tolerance levels in all aspects of design, production, machining of the parts, and assembly. This is coupled with multiple quality checks along the life of the design and manufacturing cycle of the transmitter. At Yokogawa, we do not design the product to meet the minimum required specifications and in most cases exceed our own published specifications.

When we combine the high-end design, manufacturing, and quality with the advanced technology of the DPharp sensor, the result is an extremely robust product. The one-of-a-kind digital resonating sensor is not prone to hysteresis and its special overpressure design are also considerations in ensuring a non-drifting measurement.

All of this culminates in a pressure transmitter that is not only extremely accurate, but also built to withstand just about anything.”

The customer was in desperate need of replacement transmitters to resume operations. With JMI's extensive field experience and deep understanding of what it takes to solve problems and provide solutions, the plant knew they could count on their JMI sales rep for help. JMI maintains a large stock of inventory and they were able to deliver 30 Yokogawa transmitters on Thanksgiving morning. The plant was able to

resume operations and ultimately decided to replace all the competitor’s pressure transmitters Yokogawa to avoid issues in the future.

If you are searching for reliable and accurate pressure transmitters that can withstand just about anything, contact your local JMI representative to discuss the benefits of Yokogawa EJA110E or EJA530E series.

DAVENPORT, IA – FEBRUARY 22, 2022 – Allied Valve has expanded its array of brands you know and service you can trust with its latest acquisition, Great Lakes Process Controls, Inc. Great Lakes, along with JMI Instrument Company, Power Specialties, Inc., and PROMAC, Inc., have merged together to form Allied Instrumentation. The four companies have been merged to form Allied Instrumentation, which will cover thirteen states in the Midwest, employ 65 people, and generate over $60 million in revenue. Allied Instrumentation is led by newly appointed President, Kevin Scheibler. The company will represent best-in-class products from manufacturers including Yokogawa, MSA/General Monitors, nVent Raychem, FLEXIM and TASI Group. In addition, Allied Valve and Allied Instrumentation will employ an impressive team of more than 100 certified service technicians. With the new acquisitions, Allied Instrumentation will have product representation in Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin. “This is a strategy we continue to implement,” said Barry Shoulders, CEO of Allied Valve, Inc., in announcing the move. “With these acquisitions we have consolidated four smaller firms into a larger network covering 13 states to better serve our customers and provide them with a greater array of brands and world-class product expertise.” Each of the companies acquired will offer a distinct and valuable facet to the newly merged formation of Allied Instrumentation.

Allied Instrumentation Capabilities Include:

• Procurement of process instrumentation including transmitters, flowmeters, heat-trace solutions, gas and flame detection, and wireless I/O devices, to name a few
• Assistance with sizing and selection, and custom solutions
• Installation and calibration services
• Programming assistance
• Field commissioning service

Primary Industries include:

• Refining and Specialty Chemicals
• Food and Beverage • Power
• Natural Gas/LPG/LNG Storage and Distribution
• Steel
• Pharmaceutical
• Ethanol/Biofuels
• OEM and Manufacturing The new partnership brings together a legacy of excellence that will better serve the needs of manufacturers and processing plants in the US.

Map of Allied Instrumentation Territory:


Contact us with any questions you may have.
Download the Press Release

DAVENPORT, IA – JANUARY 18, 2022 – Allied Valve has expanded its array of brands you know and service you can trust with the acquisitions of Power Specialties, Inc., PROMAC, Inc., and JMI Instrument Company. The three companies will be merged to form Allied Instrumentation, which will cover seven states in the Midwest, employ 50 people, and generate over $50 million in revenue. Allied Instrumentation will be led by newly appointed President, Kevin Scheibler. The company will represent best-in-class products from manufacturers including Yokogawa, MSA/General Monitors, nVent Raychem, AMETEK Drexelbrook, FLEXIM and TASI Group. In addition, Allied Valve and Allied Instrumentation will employ an impressive team of more than 100 certified service technicians. With the new acquisitions, Allied Instrumentation will have product representation in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, and Wisconsin. “This is part of a strategy we have been working on for a while,” said Barry Shoulders, CEO of Allied Valve, Inc., in announcing the move. “With this acquisition we are able to consolidate smaller firms into a larger network to better serve our customers and provide them with a greater array of brands and world-class product expertise.” Each of the companies acquired will offer a distinct and valuable facet to the newly merged formation of Allied Instrumentation.

Allied Instrumentation Capabilities Include:
• Procurement of process instrumentation including transmitters, flowmeters, heattrace solutions, gas and flame detection, and wireless I/O devices, to name a few
• Assistance with sizing and selection, and custom solutions
• Installation and calibration services
• Programming assistance
• Field commissioning service

Primary Industries include:
• Refining and Specialty Chemicals
• Food and Beverage
• Power
• Natural Gas/LPG/LNG Storage and Distribution
• Steel
• Pharmaceutical
• Ethanol/Biofuels • OEM and Manufacturing

The new partnership brings together a legacy of excellence that will better serve the needs of manufacturers and processing plants in the US.

Contact us with any questions you may have.

Download the Press Release

Application: Bringing the last age of digital sensors into the cloud age.

The next generation is always waiting in the wings. Every power plant, chemical site, storage tank field, or manufacturer has equipment that was installed in the past 30-40 years. These sensors that measure everything under the sun from pressure or temperature to vibration and gas concentration. A vast majority of these sensors report these measurements using an electrical signal of either 4-20mA or a scaled voltage such as 1-5V. Some later instruments utilize digital communication protocols such as Modbus or HART where multiple parameters can be transmitted with just a couple wires. Really great technologies that have paved the bedrock of the modern plant.  All these advances are what form the basis of what is called Industry 3.0. But it’s time to upgrade!

What’s Next: Defining Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is a buzzword term that itself is described with industry buzzwords and alphabet soup such as IIoT, CPS, DA, and AI. In short Industry 4.0 is the idea of bringing plant-based physical world data into the digital world for cloud computing technologies such as artificial intelligence to perform predictive maintenance calculations. It involves four guiding principles of Interconnection, Information transparency, technical assistance (AI), and decentralized decisions. The idea is that the physical instrumentation forms an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) where the sensors share an informational network for exchanging and gathering data. This data is then fed into a cloud-based database for artificial intelligence to perform cognitive computing strategies to predict upcoming maintenance before failures cause plant downtime and lost production.  

Challenges: Making the upgrade to Industry 4.0

Manufacturers and producers have a massive fleet of smart sensors deployed throughout their facilities. Replacing all these Industry 3.0 sensors with Industry 4.0 equipment is not economically feasible. What is required is a way to bring the existing instrumentation systems into the new paradigm.  Further challenges can be factors such as hazardous area classification or lack of additional power in some locations.

Solution: The Ranger to the rescue

One possible solution to bring the older instrumentation into the Industry 4.0 world is a sensor-to-cloud product such as the Ranger from Signal-Fire. The Ranger is a cellular device using LTE CAT M1 technology to provide a link from the existing signals in the field and the cloud for remote monitoring from any web browser. The Ranger comes with multiple power options including an internal battery pack or external solar panel.  The Ranger comes in a variety of model number choices, but the standard model is equipped with two digital inputs and a selectable analog input (4-20mA or 1-5V). Alternatively, models that offer a HART or Modbus connection are available. The Ranger is designed for rough environmental conditions with a temperature spec from -40F to 185C and it is certified for Class 1 Division 2 areas. Utilizing a growing technology called MQTT Sparkplug B the Ranger publishes the legacy process data to a MQTT broker. Signal-Fire offers a cloud data management service powered by AWS or the Ranger can be configured to communicate to an existing MQTT broker on the plant’s existing cloud services network.

Dave Larson
Application Engineer at JMI Instrument Company

Have you been curious about trying IoT Sensor-to-Cloud technology but unsure where to start? Now is the perfect time to try out the RANGER from SignalFire with no risk!  Instantly bring your analog and digital inputs directly to the Cloud for visualization and alarming.

For a limited time, buy one RANGER for 50% off list, try for 60 days, and if not satisfied, return it for full refund. We will even pay the return shipping.

Application: Controlling the flow of surfactant in syrup streams.
Surfactant dosing helps extract corn oil, which is the most expensive/profitable product (per pound) that the plant produces. If too little surfactant is dosed, corn oil is left behind in the syrup and efficiency/profitability decrease. If too much surfactant is dosed, chemicals are wasted and efficiency/profitability decreases. Getting the correct flow rate is crucial!

Challenges:
Many Ethanol production processes still use a manual draw down method to check or change surfactant flow rate. It's a manual process that involves filling a graduated cylinder with surfactant, then letting the pump draw from the cylinder while recording time. From there they would calculate the dosing rate. This is a very time intensive process and does not give much control of flow rates. 

Solution:
JMI’s solution was to use The Rotomass Prime from Yokogawa’s Rotomass Total Insight multi-Tier series of Coriolis Flow Meters. The Rotomass Prime is a flexible and cost effective solution for highly accurate flow and density measurements. With advanced density calibration and process insight alarms, accurate and reliable mass flow readings are a guarantee. 

Result:
After 3 months of successful runtime this is what our customer had to say...

"We have seen significant process improvements since the unit was installed. The Rotomass coriolis meter has allowed us to control the surfactant flow to a degree we have never been able to in the past.  This has led to significant savings on the chemical as well as enhanced ability to set up alarms to determine when our pumps are having problems.

DOWNLOAD THE case study

Monitoring Energy Consumption at Universities and Colleges

Universities and colleges spend an average of 18 cents per square foot on natural gas and $1.10 per square foot on electricity every year. Lighting accounts for about 31 percent of the annual utility bill, while heating and cooling account for about 28 percent. Heating water is the third largest expense, comprising about 25 percent of a university's yearly utility payments. Reducing utility bills through sound energy management is a major priority for most universities.

Energy management is particularly challenging for universities due to the large number of buildings, including dormitories, which have different energy requirements and different ways of consuming energy. And while managing the energy use in so many buildings is difficult, staying within the often-tight facility budget is even harder, requiring the awareness and cooperation of thousands of faculty, staff and students. JMI can help with measurement and control of chilled water and steam utilities throughout the campus. 

Control steam flow with greater dynamics.

Shubert & Salzer’s Sliding gate control valve ensure The level of quality attainable in controlling a steam plant is heavily dependent on the dynamic characteristics of the total system comprising the control element, actuator and controller. The control parameters for sliding gate valves relating to dynamic behavior are clearly superior to those for conventional control valves. As a result, the highly responsive dynamics not only improve the control quality but also form the basis for control circuits with very short reaction times. This has proved to be the key factor in steam savings of up to 30 %. Current comparisons of steam plant operators show that savings of this magnitude are attainable only by installing a sliding gate valve in place of a traditional control valve.

Read this application note on Shubert & Salzer,  The sliding gate valve reins in costs for steam systems
The sliding gate valve reins in costs for steam systems

You can’t manage what you don’t measure! 

Many universities have gone through an evolution of trying to meter thermal energy consumption throughout their campus. The success of these ventures can be elusive when the meter chosen for the job doesn’t live up to expectations. Examples include insertion meters that over time will foul and meters that cannot respond to low velocities that are prevalent during off-peak metering. FLEXIM’s Thermal Energy / BTU Flow Meter is Trusted by 150+ Universities. FLEXIM’s Thermal Energy / BTU Flow Meter is the premier offering in the market today. FLEXIM ultrasonic clamp-on meters do not require shutdown and are very cost effective to install. In fact, clamp-on ultrasonic meters have been doing the job of BTU-metering for decades. FLEXIM’s thermal energy meters support your efforts towards more energy efficient buildings and facilities. More than 150 colleges and universities throughout the country have trusted FLEXIM as their preferred vendor for thermal energy meters. Every university we deal with will attest to FLEXIM’s performance, reliability and support.

DOWNLOAD The Thermal Energy Newsletter

"We haven't had to calibrate or re-zero any of the new Yokogawa transmitters. We check the zero and span calibration with our calibrator and every single transmitter is within spec, the process of calibration stops when the transmitter is within spec and we can move on to the next."

Natural gas is arguably the most important deliverable utility in certain regions of the country. Rain, snow, polar vortex, or sunshine, natural gas is necessary to heat our homes, cook our food, and keep our businesses operating. There is little tolerance for operational mishaps or down service.

A local Midwest gas company operates gas storage, gas transmission, and tap stations across the Chicagoland area with hundreds of pressure measurement points all throughout the process. Pressure measurement is critical for monitoring and controlling various processes from extraction to customer delivery. With so many critical pressure measurement points to maintain and calibrate, these I&E technicians are extremely busy performing regular zero and span adjustments and calibrations 2-3 times a year on hundreds of transmitters while also maintaining other critical process equipment. Experience and history has shown this company that the pressure transmitters they were using tended to drift with changing climates and/or over pressure events normal for gas transmission throughout the seasons. For example, transmitters that were calibrated and zero adjusted in January needed to be re adjusted in May when the weather got a little warmer and then again in November when the weather got colder. Also, whenever a normal over pressure event occurred, they would deploy an instrument technician to re zero and calibrate the transmitter. All of this activity to maintain proper pressure measurements coupled with other routine equipment maintenance was perceived as normal operating procedures and had been the way of life for almost 25 years. When approached with active digital sensor pressure transmitter technology available exclusively from Yokogawa, the promise of drift free operation in all real world conditions offered a solution to a problem they didn't even know they had. Some test units were installed in various applications throughout their operations and a close eye was kept on performance for 1 year through all 4 seasons. The active digital sensor technology performed extremely well without any change in zero or span stability through a frigid winter and scorching summer transition. Hundreds of transmitters were installed throughout the region to take advantage of this technology in the operations.

Soon after installing hundreds of transmitters, this local Midwest gas company noticed that their I&E technicians were spending 75% LESS time on their instrument calibration routes! One technician reported; "We haven't had to calibrate or re-zero any of the new Yokogawa transmitters. We check the zero and span calibration with our calibrator and every single transmitter is within spec, the process of calibration stops when the transmitter is within spec and we can move on to the next." This tremendous saving of time not only helped the technicians complete their transmitter checks quicker, but also allowed larger time-consuming projects to be completed within or ahead of schedule as the time historically spent on calibrations could be spent achieving operations upgrades and optimization. 8 years later, the same active digital pressure transmitters installed all throughout the area are still in service and still have never needed any zero or span adjustment.

Overall, the entire operational procedure for this company had changed and become more efficient, profitable, and safer, all because they fixed a problem they didn't know they had.

Want to know why? Check out the video on the DPharp sensor technology below, another Yokogawa innovation.

LIQUID LEVEL MEASUREMENT WHITE PAPER

PERFORMANCE UNDER PRESSURE-DP TRANSMITTER TECHNICAL NOTE

PRESSURE HANDBOOK A BASIC GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING PRESSURE

PRESSURE MEASUREMENT PRODUCTS

Download a copy of the PDF

	YOKOGAWA EJA430E YOKOGAWA EJA110E