Grain elevators are facilities at which grains are received, stored, and then distributed for direct use, process manufacturing, or export. Most facilities, however, are home to other operations such as cleaning, drying, and blending. For the most part, these processes have stayed the same for the last 150 years. Of course, better elevators and facilities have been developed and implemented as time has passed, but the basic engineering has stayed the same. In recent decades though, while those same engineering principles have stayed the same, systems and controls changed and evolved as the expansion of computer technology exploded. [...]

For years, businesses and governments have been talking more and more about the environmental impact of modern industrial manufacturing processes and the costs associated with conventional energy sources such as coal and oil.  That combined with the projected increase in fossil fuel consumption in countries such as China and India has lead to a resurgence of new investment and research in the renewable energy commercialization sector.

Robert Maxfield, the Vice President and Control System Architect of Third Evolution, recently got to see just how cutting edge companies can be in this sector while deploying ThinManager in a new state of the art facility specializing in Biomethane capture and processing.  “Our client originally came to us wanting to implement a Citrix XenDesktop thin client architecture into one of their existing facilities.  Having worked with it before, I knew that ThinManager was much easier to deploy and operate as well as offering greater management capabilities, so I offered to show them proof of concept of our proposed architecture using Wonderware InTouch and ThinManager instead.  After seeing it in person, they were sold.” [...]