Research Topic for Instrumentation and Control Engineering

Hello Broodmeister,

I am the Plant Electrician and Asst. Maint. Manager for a Copper Foundry in Sherburne, NY.What kind of real life problems are you looking for, I am in the middle of integrating older manual controls to automated devices. I am aslo trying to setup a intranet of monitors and meters and such to be able to collect and or control instrumentation from key areas in the plant. I have 6 annealling oven bases and two ovens that need work, I am also preparing to automate the counting proces of some of our as-cast products being weight is a major factor for some customers.

In all feel free to contact me and discuss further. Will check back often as I always am on here at least 1-2 times a day . Thank You

I've been out of the high vacuum industry for a few decades, so something like this probably already exists. But it didn't (to my knowledge) when I was designing equipment. The project would be to servo a gas pressure in a vacuum chamber to an ion gauge. The ion gauge is an interesting vacuum "tube". Current from thermionic emission is converted into a pressure. A small leak valve would need to be controlled based on the measured pressure to maintain a desired pressure.

This is not necessarily a simple problem because of the variables involved. But I can see it being useful in a research environment. An option would be to also make the system work with different pressure sensing devices. For example, a quadrupole mass spectrometer could be used with the leak valve to maintain a partial pressure of some species.

These things may already exist. For sure they do for pressures in the 1 to 100 micron range, which is commonly used in the semiconductor industry for sputtering. Ion gauges typically are only used below around 1 micron (10^-6 Torr) because they can be ruined at higher pressures. They get used down to pressures in the 10^-11 Torr ranges in ultra high vacuum systems (and these pressures are not easy to achieve).

Maybe the project would be a general electronic circuit with appropriate control algorithm(s) that allow use with multiple sensors and leak valves. Your real value adds would be 1) robust control algorithms that work with a variety of hardware and 2) instructions on how to adapt the system to control new hardware. It's conceivable that such a product might be marketable if such things don't already exist.