Book Image

Industrial Automation from Scratch

By : Olushola Akande
Book Image

Industrial Automation from Scratch

By: Olushola Akande

Overview of this book

Industrial automation has become a popular solution for various industries looking to reduce manual labor inputs and costs by automating processes. This book helps you discover the abilities necessary for excelling in this field. The book starts with the basics of industrial automation before progressing to the application of switches, sensors, actuators, and motors, and a direct on-line (DOL) starter and its components, such as circuit breakers, contactors, and overload relay. Next, you'll explore VFDs, their parameter settings, and how they can be wired and programmed for induction motor control. As you advance, you'll learn the wiring and programming of major industrial automation tools – PLCs, HMIs, and SCADA. You’ll also get to grips with process control and measurements (temperature, pressure, level, and flow), along with analog signal processing with hands-on experience in connecting a 4–20 mA transmitter to a PLC. The concluding chapters will help you grasp various industrial network protocols such as FOUNDATION Fieldbus, Modbus, PROFIBUS, PROFINET, and HART, as well as emerging trends in manufacturing (Industry 4.0) and its empowering technologies (such as IoT, AI, and robotics). By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a practical understanding of industrial automation concepts for machine automation and control.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Learning the Concepts and Skills Required to Get Started
8
Part 2: Understanding PLC, HMI, and SCADA
14
Part 3: Process Control, Industrial Network, and Smart Factory

Switches and Sensors – Working Principles, Applications, and Wiring

Understanding how human being functions will help you understand automation. Having a brain is not enough for a human being to operate. Sight, hearing, touch, and smell are required to provide information about the environment for the brain to process. Similarly, switches and sensors provide information about the environment for a controller to process. The result of processing determines the actions that will be carried out by an actuator, which will be discussed in the next chapter. This chapter is specifically reserved for switches and sensors to enable us to discuss actuators in depth. Just like sight, hearing, touch, and smell are important for humans to function, switches and sensors are important components that are required to automate an industrial process.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

  • Introducing switches and sensors
  • Describing manually operated switches...