Instrumentation & Control Engineering
‘INSTRUMENTATION’ and ‘CONTROL ENGINEERING’, both the words are of technical terminology. So further moving on let us see the meaning of both the terms separately. INSTRUMENTATION is termed as the art and science of measurement and control of the process variables within a production of manufacturing area. The variables are used in industries are Level, Pressure, Temperature, Humidity, Flow, Force, speed etc.
CONTROL ENGINEERING or in simple terms referred as CONTROL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING is the engineering branch that applies control theory to design systems with desired characters and behaviour. Control engineers are responsible for the research, designs, development and control devices or system, typically in manufacturing industries and factories. Sensors are widely used mainly to measure the output performance of the device being controlled and those measurement further use to give the required feedback to the input controller or in technical terms ‘actuators’. The actuator has the special characteristics that it can make the corrections towards the desired performance. When a device or a system is designed to perform without the influence of human effort and inputs for the correction then it is called AUTOMATIC CONTROL, for example speed controller used in lifts when it fails or broken down. So further moving on let us see the basic requirement of an instrumentation and control engineer:-
- Design and develop control systems
- Maintaining the existing control systems
- Managing the control systems
- Troubleshoot
- Ensuring the instruments and devices works properly with full safety measures
- Ensuring the quality standards of the working devices
Basically control engineering was all about the continuous system , but after the technological advancement it interfered in the day to day human activities such as in designing various software such as CFD, AUTOCAD, CAutoD etc had been introduced, which totally changed the era of computerised designing and technology.
