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.

This article discusses some critical items to address for a calibration program based on sound metrology fundamentals without a complete overhaul of the calibration program. Having properly calibrated process control instrumentation provides a high quality of process control, a process that will operate to design specifications, and prevents the process from being stressed as it compensates for inaccurate measurement data feeding the DCS. Realization of these benefits may be challenging to quantify and attribute to implementing any of the suggested changes, but conversely, implementation of the changes should not be extraordinarily burdensome on resources.  

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.

How often should instruments be calibrated? That is a question we get asked often. It would be nice to give a simple answer to that question, but unfortunately, that is not possible. Instead, there are several considerations that affect the answer of a correct calibration period. In this post, I will discuss these considerations.

In this post, I would like to talk you about the Ohm’s law. Why? Because it is helpful in many practical every-day situations, especially if you are an instrument technician. We often get questions that can be answered with an answer derived from the Ohm’s law.