Reheat Furnace and Rolling Mill Optimization in Steel
Where the hot end's energy, yield, and quality really trade off, and the instrumentation that holds the line.
Zoniax · Archive
Field Notes · Page 4
Field notes on industrial operations intelligence — sensors, edge telemetry, and machine learning for processing plants.
CIP Optimization: Cut Water and Time, Keep the Clean
How instrumented return lines turn over-cautious clean-in-place cycles into measured ones, without ever shipping a failed clean.
Anomaly Detection on Process Data: Before the Alarm Trips
Fixed alarm limits catch the gross excursion and miss the early drift. Here's how learned anomaly detection scores raw sensor streams, and why the threshold, not the model, is the hard part.
ISA-95 in Practice: Wiring the Plant Floor to the ERP
How the standard maps the plant-to-business seam, what it actually standardizes, and where real integrations slip.
MTBF and MTTR: Four Myths That Hide Downtime
Reliability metrics are only as honest as the failure definition and the timestamps behind them. Four claims worth dismantling.
Process Historian vs Time-Series Database
Two ways to store plant data, compared by storage cost, query, integration, and fit - and how to tell which one your operation actually needs.
Edge vs Cloud for Industrial Analytics
Stop deciding edge-versus-cloud plant-wide. Decide it per workload, on latency, bandwidth, reliability, and who maintains it.
OEE for Process Operations: What Actually Limits Throughput
Overall equipment effectiveness travels to a continuous plant only if you stop counting parts and start measuring flow, loss, and the constraint.
OPC-UA, Modbus, or MQTT: Picking a Plant Protocol
A working engineer's comparison of the three protocols that run plant networks, scored on the criteria that actually decide a deployment.