Latest News

Practitioners and leaders involved with the important role of improving the reliability and performance of an industrial facility should be recognized for their knowledge, experience and contribution.

While stocks last at Fluke authorised distributors, as part of the celebrations of its 70th year Fluke is reducing the recommended sale price of two key maintenance test and measurement tools with a saving of around 20% until the 1st of October 2018. The offer includes the Fluke 87V Industrial Multimeter, which provides accurate measurements on adjustable speed motor drives and other electrically noisy equipment, and the Fluke Connect® compatible 376 FC Clamp Meter, which can troubleshoot intermittent faults with logging and wireless data transmission capabilities for real time collaboration with colleagues away from the field.

The National Space Centre’s Launch Pad project lifted off to new heights with a dramatic community launch – which took construction to the edges of earth’s atmosphere.
 
The launch provided a spectacle for hundreds of school children, local residents and workers who witnessed a teddy bear, and a construction bolt that will later be used as part of the completed works, ascending into the atmosphere powered by a huge helium balloon.

Belzona has been providing a truly global service for over 66 years with the supply of repair composite materials and protective coatings. Alongside a global network consisting of over 160 Distributors across more than 140 countries, there is a large focus committed to offering a worldwide reach to their customers. Belzona’s current multilingual website sees over 200,000 new people visiting www.belzona.com each year.    

The International Machine Vibration Analysis and Condition Monitoring conference held in Gold Coast, Australia, August 6-9, 2018 will host a tour of the Seqwater Gold Coast Desalination Plant on Monday August 6, 2018.

Gold Coast, QLD - IMVAC Australia will host a tour of the Seqwater Gold Coast Desalination Plant. The tour will commence with a site overview talk/presentation on the water treatment process and the maintenance management process adopted at the site.  Then the 90-minute walking part of the tour will cover: the intake area (large vertical pumps), drum screens (large rotating drum screens), pretreatment building (large concrete tanks containing filtration media), remineralization (pumps, pipework, valves), chemical area (various types of tanks, plus pumps, pipework, valves) and potable water (large horizontal pumps, pipework, valves).

Plant maintenance operations are a necessity to maintain and secure production capacity. They usually imply a temporary reduction in production output which makes maintenance efficiency an important factor in many industries. With reliable and highly customisable signs and labels, maintenance attention points on machinery can be clearly marked, equipment can easily be identified and signs can indicate which areas are included in upcoming maintenance projects.

Reflecting its radical approach, a search for up to 75 ambitious young adults has been launched by NMiTE (www.nmite.org.uk), the future engineering university being created in Hereford, to spend their gap year creating the country's most innovative student experience.

It is open to anyone aged 18 or over who is currently planning a gap year before university or after graduating (not necessarily in engineering). They will be helping co-create everything from the facilities to the student experience of the first new university in Britain for over 40 years.  

Professor Helen Rogers, the Design Cohort lead at NMiTE, said: "NMiTE is effectively offering 75 young adults the unique opportunity to play Sim City in real life, with university facilities being designed and built around them based on their ideas, research and input.

Summer festival season, and for many, time for nothing better than a pint of real ale to quench the thirst. But when demand is high it’s especially important for the busy bartender to know when the gravity fed cask is nearing empty.  
 
No one wants to serve, or be served, a glassful of sediment so the traditional prevention methods are to manually record the number of units dispensed from the cask coupled with dipstick testing to double-check the level.  This is laborious and time consuming and certainly not ideal when there are queues of thirsty customers waiting to be served.
 
One solution that is proving increasingly popular is thermal imaging.  This technology is extensively used throughout industry in all manner of fault finding applications as well as for inspecting vessels and monitoring their content level.  Until recently, however, the cost of an infrared camera has ruled out its use for niche applications such as commercial beer cask checking.
 
FLIR Systems has been instrumental in rolling out the technology to a much wider audience with the development of its Lepton® micro-detector which is the size of a SIM card.  This has led to thermal imaging being incorporated into meters for the trades and even smartphones.  And as a result it is now a simple, quick and highly cost-effective detection method that recently proved its worth at the Cambridge Beer Festival.
 
Thermal imaging expert, Allister Pirrie – a thermographer with Baldock-based building surveyors Stanburys Limited – was invited to demonstrate the scope of the technology at the event.
 
“I met one of the organisers at a completely unrelated trade show where I was using thermal imaging to confirm the energy efficiency of a new pipe lagging system,” Allister explained.  “A guy in the audience then asked if the camera would be able to detect fluid level in beer casks and I ended up putting the camera through its paces at the festival. The images show how clearly the beer level can be seen in the cask and there is a range of FLIR cameras available from Stanburys suitable for the job including the entry level FLIR C2 and FLIR C3 fully-featured, pocket sized thermal imaging cameras.
 
Another big benefit of thermal imaging is that it is not restricted to a single application. It can also, for example, be used to take a temperature measurement of the beer from the face of the cask or the gas cylinder level on a barbeque.

A skilled engineer in a senior hands-on role, Libby Peacock shares her story to encourage more women and girls to enter the engineering profession.

As Product Manager for Pneumatics at Brammer Buck & Hickman, Libby has around twenty years’ experience in the pneumatics industry. Starting her career in a small engineering company making appointments for the sales team, Libby’s manager encouraged her to cement her on-the-job knowledge by attending night school.   

Valuekeep has been selected as the CMMS solution provider for Ardaunt, a Facilities Management service provider in the UK, to manage the maintenance operations across their multi-site projects.

Ardaunt, a Facilities Management service provider with more than 24 years of experience in the field, found on Valuekeep’s cloud-based CMMS software the best solution for a broader control of corrective and preventive work, as well as the full control over work orders, incidents, costs and materials consumptions across their multi-site projects in the UK.