Pressure transmitters are widely used in the process industry. The advertised accuracy specification of modern pressure transmitters has become more and more accurate.

Often the advertised accuracy specification includes anyhow only part of the truth. It includes only some of the accuracy components effecting the total accuracy that you can expect from the transmitter in practice in your application.

In this blog post, I will examine some popular pressure transmitters’ accuracy specifications and the different accuracy components, such as effect of: re-ranging, ambient temperature, mounting position, static pressure, long term drift, vibration, power supply and more.

I will shortly explain what these components are and what they mean with a few examples.

Temperature measurement is one of the most common measurements in the process industry.

Every temperature measurement loop has a temperature sensor as the first component in the loop. So, it all starts with a temperature sensor. The temperature sensor plays a vital role in the accuracy of the whole temperature measurement loop.

As any measurement instrument you want to be accurate, also the temperature sensor needs to be calibrated regularly. Why would you measure temperature, if you don’t care about the accuracy?

In this blog post, I will take a look at how to calibrate temperature sensors and what are the most common things you should consider when calibrating temperature sensors.

In this post we share an educational video on how to calibrate weighing scales.

The video goes through the various tests that should be performed during a scale calibration / scale recalibration.

These tests include:

• Eccentricity test
• Repeatability test
• Weighing test
• Minimum weight test

Process instrument calibration is just one of the many maintenance related activities in a process plant. The last thing you want to do is to have your limited resources wasting time performing unnecessary calibrations or using time-consuming, ineffective calibration procedures.

Yet, you need to make sure that all critical calibrations are completed, ensuring the site stays running efficiently with minimal downtime, product quality is maintained, while the plant remains regulatory and safety compliant, and audit-ready.   

In this blog post, I will share with you a two-part webinar series titled “How to calibrate temperature instruments”. We did this webinar together with our partner ISA (International Society of Automation).

The webinars covers some theory, many practical things, demonstrations of temperature instrument calibration and Questions & Answers sections.

In some earlier blog posts, I have discussed temperature calibration and calibration uncertainty. This time I will be covering the different uncertainty components that you should take into account when you make a temperature calibration using a temperature dry block. 

Making a temperature calibration using a dry block seems like a pretty simple and straight forward thing to do, however there are many possible sources for uncertainty and error that should be considered. Often the biggest uncertainties may come from the procedure on how the calibration is done, not necessarily from the specifications of the components.

Let’s turn the heat on!

In this blog post, I will take a short look at the AMS2750E standard, with a special focus on the requirements set for calibration, calibration accuracy and test/calibration equipment.

The Pt100 temperature sensors are very common sensors in the process industry. This blog post discusses many useful and practical things to know about the Pt100 sensors. There's information on RTD and PRT sensors, different Pt100 mechanical structures, temperature-resistance relationship, temperature coefficients, accuracy classes and on many more.  

In this blog post, I want to share with you a two-part webinar series titled “How to calibrate pressure instruments” we did together with our partner ISA (International Society of Automation).

In this blog post, I will discuss the most common data integrity pitfalls in the calibration process.

Whether the calibration process is fully paper-based, or partially utilizing documenting calibrators, or even fully paperless, there are places in calibration processes where data integrity most commonly is jeopardized and needs special attention.