Wayne Labs has more than 30 years of editorial experience in industrial automation. He served as senior technical editor for I&CS/Control Solutions magazine for 18 years where he covered software, control system hardware and sensors/transmitters. Labs ran his own consulting business and contributed feature articles to Electronic Design, Control, Control Design, Industrial Networking and Food Engineering magazines. Before joining Food Engineering, he served as a senior technical editor for Omega Engineering Inc. Labs also worked in wireless systems and served as a field engineer for GE’s Mobile Communications Division and as a systems engineer for Bucks County Emergency Services. In addition to writing technical feature articles, Wayne covers FE’s Engineering R&D section.
EnWave's drying process, which combines vacuum and microwave technologies to dry foods such as blueberries or cheese, has found application in cannabis flowers and hemp.
Bad news first: If you make pet food, have an older facility and have been putting off examining your operation in light of FSMA, rushing to comply with the new food safety rules for animal foods is probably proving to be a challenge.
In a Tech Update feature headlined “PLCs/PACs: Keys to the IIoT kingdom,” we looked at programmable controllers (PLCs), programmable automation controllers (PACs) and to some extent industrial PCs (IPCs), the latter of which can certainly be applied to most any level of control—e.g., discrete, PID, batch, etc. We considered new functionality in today’s controllers, internal operating systems, I/O capabilities, security and networking—both at the fieldbus/controls level (OT) and IT-side connections.
The Hershey Company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire ONE Brands, LLC, the maker of low-sugar, high-protein nutrition bars. The acquisition is expected to enable Hershey to provide a competitive offering in the nutrition bar category.
We’re told to collect as much data from our processes as we can, and there’s practically infinite storage space in the cloud—but how do you make sense of all this data?
With automation and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), it’s now easier than ever to collect data and monitor production—all this in the name of managing food quality and food safety. But, with multiple sites and lines supplying data around the clock, any staff would be all but overwhelmed—without a direction in where to focus their process management efforts.
Crown Beverage Packaging North America’s new 14,000-sq.-ft. graphics design studio serves the entire U.S. and Canada, offering can design and consulting services and providing rapid proofs made on a digital system to preview art and produce printing plates for all U.S. and Canadian customers.
The Australian Cyber Security Center provides an updated “Essential Eight Maturity Model” to help you determine your maturity level in mitigating cybersecurity issues in eight key areas
A recent statement from U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber+Infrastructure’s (CISA) National Cyber Awareness System noted that the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) has updated its “Essential Eight Maturity Model.” Though all this sounds like alphabet soup or bureaucratic gobble-de-gook, the Maturity Model consists of eight important mitigation strategies you should be employing to protect your computing systems.
I asked Steve Gidman, founder and president of Fortress Technology, about some of the challenges and successes in designing the company's Interceptor DF system.