Preproduction Testing

In preparation for a new product launch, Martel is adding new temperature calibration equipment. The 2 major pieces are a Fluke Hart Scientific 9210 Triple Point of Water and a Fluke Hart Scientific 7341 High Precision Temperature Baths.

Here are some pictures of the new equipment, which is shown being used in preproduction testing now. By the end of our summer they will become the foundation of a production temperature calibration lab.

Hart 9210 Triple Point of Water

Hart 7341 Precision Temperature Bath

The current issue of Control Magazine (digital edition here) has a whole page of links to worthwhile calibration resources from some of the big players in the industry.

Most of them are white papers, but one is another web site with a “ton” of great links to other resources.

If you need to learn or know more about important calibration issues, you should have a look.

There is an interesting discussion thread going on at Linked In about whether plant operators should be allowed to adjust or change instrument settings (including calibration).

If you are on Linked In, you can find the discussion here http://bit.ly/1ez5lo. If not, you’ll need to sign up for a free account.

My personal and professional opinion for calibration is a decided NO. Actually, it’s NO, NO, NO, NO!

Inadequate calibration maintenance is already a plague at most process plants and allowing anyone other than a qualified calibration professional with the right tools to make a change that affects calibration is sheer madness and dangerous to boot.

While a little tweak may appear to fix things momentarily, pretty soon it will add up to a huge problem.

I feel qualified to make this statement having worked on both sides of the equation. Operators do need to feel and be empowered, but that should be limited to making setpoint adjustments, which even then may need to be limited. It’s easy to lose the big picture when you’re having a problem in the control room. Setpoints, calibration, etc. all have to come together to make the big picture pretty.

Do you need to know more or wish you knew more about flowmeters?

Our friends at OMEGA Engineering have an excellent on-line tutorial in their Transactions material. I think you can also request this in hard copy from them.

The tutorial starts out with some interesting history about the development of flowmeters. I’ll bet you didn’t know that the earliest flowmeters are from around 5,000 BCE!

The material is technical enough to be of interest, but doesn’t really require much beyond algebra and a little knowledge of physics to be understandable.

The topics cover differential pressure type flowmeters, mechanical (positive displacement) flowmeters, various electronic flowmeters including magnetic flowmeters, vortex meters and ultrasonic flowmeters. There’s also a section on mass flow measurement using coriolis and thermal flowmeters.

It’s worth a look. You can find it here.

A couple of weeks ago, Jim Cahill of Emerson Process commented in his blog about the importance of getting back to basics in instrumentation and controls. His point was that no matter how sophisticated, expensive or new your system is, it can still be an automation or control disaster.

He talked a lot about an installation that suffered from poor loop tuning and the like, but this also applies to instrument calibration.

It seems obvious, but poor or inaccurate calibration will cost you a lot more in money, materials, headaches and safety than what the fix costs.

Here are a few things that are what I think about when I say back to basics in calibration.

• Use modern equipment. Newer calibrators make the job easier and easier to do with great accuracy. The accuracy of calibration equipment today is much better today than 20 years ago.
• Keep your calibrators calibrated. Some people are surprised to learn that even calibrators need to be calibrated. Whether you use the original manufacturer for periodic recalibration or a third party lab or maybe even an in-house lab, calibrations need to be kept up-to-date. That means a qualified NIST or other national lab traceable calibration with data.
• Use automated calibrations and automated documentation. Not only do these features make the job easier and provide good calibration history, they also prevent errors in the work.
• Do the routine work. If you’re always putting out fires, you’ll always be putting out fires. Routine, regular calibration does pay off. I know, this is really a management problem. You just have to keep asking for the resources long enough to be a real pain in the you-know-what to actually get the resources. This is where using modern equipment helps, too, because it can stretch out the staff you have to get more work done.

Is factory service really worth the extra money?

I respectfully submit that the wrong question has been asked. For 2 reasons.

One, factory service probably isn’t really extra money. Two, factory service really is better than 3rd party service. I’ll tell you why.

For the most part, calibrators cannot be easily serviced by 3rd parties except for routine calibration. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it boils down to knowledge and technology. Third parties cannot have much, if any, knowledge about all the different brands and models of calibrators in the market, especially if you consider the rate of advance in calibrator technology over the last 20 years.

Modern calibrators are high complex digital devices with sophisticated firmware functions. Factory technicians not only have specific experience with the products, they have access to the engineers who desinged them in the first place. None of that is available to 3rd party technicians.

Factory technicians can afford to specialize in the equipment their company makes. If a 3rd party technician tried to do the same, she would only work every few days when one of her specialties came in for repair. That’s not a good way to earn a living.

Factory technicians also have ready access to all the special parts that might be needed to make repairs. It’s unlikely your calibrator will be sitting around on a shelf waiting for parts (unless it’s woefully obsolete).

Technology is another issue. As an example, consider replacement of the pressure sensor in a pressure calibrator. There’s a lot more going on than just soldering in a new sensor. Proper calibration data specific to the sensor has to also be loaded in the calibrator. This may require the use of an environmental chamber, special data acquisition equipment and the like to work. No 3rd party repair shop can do that if they even had an idea of how to go about it.

So, what happens when you send in your calibrator to a 3rd party lab for repair? Why, they send it to the original manufacturer, of course. And, then, they mark up that cost and pass it along to you, the user. It takes more time and it costs more than if it was sent to the Original Manufacturer in the first place.

Wouldn’t it be better overall to save time and money by sending your calibrator back to the people who know how to service it, have the parts to service it and really care about supporting their product and their users?

On Monday, Martel was featured in the Derry/Londonderry issue of the New Hampshire Union Leader. An article by Kimberly Pietz related our story of a small company with a big impact on the process control calibration market.

Most of our competitors are Fortune 500 companies or, at least Fortune 1000 companies. Fortunately for us, some of them are also our customers. That makes our small business the tail that wags the dog, so to speak.

The article speaks about how we market our brand products (sold under the Martel BETA logo) to a world-wide audience of power plants, chemical plants and the like. It also mentioned that our BetaGauge 330 and it’s siblings are used extensively in the natural gas pipeline business around the world.

Calibration is important for safe and efficient operation of plants everywhere and the reporter got that message and presented it loud and clear.

Another big highlight in the printed copy of the article (unfortunately not included in the on-line edition) was a picture of one of our talented assemblers, Liana, putting pressure sensors on a calibrator circuit board. For the on-line article go here.

BetaGauge 330 Pressure Calibrator

The December 2008 issue of Machinery and Equipment MRO Magazine featured the new BetaGauge 330 in their “What’s New” section.

For more on the BetaGauge 330, go here.

A big thanks goes out to Mark Reid at our Canadian distributor TechniCAL Systems for making this happen.

Unlike some manufacturers, Martel provides a useful calibration certificate with each calibrator at no additional charge. The only exception is the old MS-420, which does not have a display and therefore there is no actual data to document.

By useful calibration certificate, I mean the following:

1. The certificate identifies the specific instrument involved by model number and serial number.
2. The certificate identifies the specific standards used for the calibration by model number and serial number, and provides evidence that the standard’s own calibration was within a valid date range.
3. The certificate includes data for each test point. This includes the value applied or measured by the standard and the comparable data for the calibrator being tested. Further the deviation from the expected data is recorded and a pass/fail test is applied.
4. The total uncertainty ratio (TUR) for each test point is provided if it is less than 4.
5. The technician who performed the test is identified.
6. Martel’s internal test procedure is identified.
7. Our “Statement of Calibration” is included on the certificate.

In addition to all of this, we save ALL of this data and can reprint the certificate upon demand when the customer cannot locate their copy (the one the originally came with the instrument).

Further, our calibrations conform to the ANSI Z540.1 standard. This is also included on the calibration statement at no charge.

We, hope and plan to be able to offer accredited calibrations under the ISO 17025 standard at some future point. In the meantime, we use a 3rd party to provide an accredited calibration certificate at extra cost for any customer who needs that.

Martel recently updated our main calibrator web site to make it more useful to our customers and distributors. Here are some of the main changes:

1. The look was changed to match our new corporate identity color scheme and imaging. It’s not a functional change, but it sure looks hot.
2. Links to our world wide network of distributors are available with plans to enhance this even more so it’s easier to buy a Martel calibrator or BetaGauge. (By the way, have you read the history of the BetaGauge on this blog?)
3. It’s easier to find the product information about you’re looking for.
4. It is highly optimized for important calibrator keywords, so Google and other search engines find and list us as a calibrator provider.

There’s an easy to click link to the latest on this blog, too.

In addition to these changes, our first web video is on the site.

The video is a “tour’ of our new facilty in Derry, New Hampshire. It only takes 2 minutes to get a good idea what we are all about and to see some shots of our people at work. It will take you from a bare circuit board through to a finished pressure or temperature calibrator. You’ll see our top flight customer service team on the phones and learn why at Martel we say “Calibration Technology Starts Here…”

We plan to produce and publish more videos of the “how to” type in the future. Feel free to offer suggestions by commenting back to this blog.