A key focus for us in our July/August issue will be a look ahead to the PPMA Show, the Sensors & Instrumentation Show and the Machine Building Show – taking place at the Birmingham NEC at the end of September. See right for details, with full previews on pages 13, 20 and 22 respectively.
Staying with the exhibition theme, I attended a very busy AUTOMATICA in Munich during June. With increasingly shorter product lifecycles, smaller batch sizes and many variants, there is no question that assembly automation is undergoing a change. The suppliers of systems and components are having to react to these changes, and the event provided some vital advice and guidance on how to do this as cost effectively and efficiently as possible.
The show, which welcomed 34,500 visitors from more than 100 countries, also provided a platform for automation and production process innovations as well as the world’s largest range of robotics, assembly lines and machine vision systems.
As for the rest of our July/August issue, one of our features this month will look at communications & networking where Pacepacker will discuss the benefits of remote diagnostics. Tying in with the Sensors & Instrumentation Show, we’ll also be running a sensing feature which will include two interesting case studies from Variohm EuroSensor and Sensor Technology, looking at applications in the agricultural and aerospace sectors respectively.
Our industry focus this month is on the oil and gas sector where we highlight the increasingly sophisticated and intelligent products and control technologies in offshore oil and gas production. We will also look at an application for Schaeffler where the company’s maintenance-free spherical bearings have been installed on a newly constructed process module extension column fixed to an offshore platform in the North Sea.
Joe Bush – Editor
Click here to view the digital issue for July/August 2014.
