Blogs and News

Unical, Uniclean and cCare: Automated Cleaning Without the Confusion

Sensors foul. On a wastewater plant or in metal processing they foul fast enough that manual cleaning becomes the limiting factor on how many measuring points a team can look after. Knick has three control units for automating that job, and the names get used interchangeably when they should not be. Here is what each one is.

Ceramat or SensoGate: Choosing a Retractable Fitting

A retractable fitting lets you take a sensor out of a live process without shutting it down. Knick makes two families of them and they are not interchangeable: the choice comes down to what your process does to a seal. This is how to tell which one your measuring point needs.

MemoSuite: Calibrating Sensors at the Bench Instead of in the Plant

Calibrating a sensor in situ means taking your instrumentation people to the least convenient place on the plant, often in weather, sometimes in a hazardous area, and asking them to do careful work there. MemoSuite moves that job to a bench, and changes what happens at the measuring point into something far simpler: swapping a used sensor for one that is already calibrated.

A Compliant, Automated pH Loop End to End: How SensoGate, cCare and Protos II 4400 Fit Together

It is easy to look at a retractable fitting, an automated cleaning system and a transmitter as three separate line items on a bill of materials. In practice, they are one system. Put SensoGate, cCare and the Protos II 4400 together and you get a pH loop that is safer to maintain, runs itself between calibrations, and proves its own compliance to field level.

At DP-Flow we specify the complete loop regularly: for pharmaceutical manufacturers managing data integrity obligations, for food and beverage plants trying to reduce batch risk, and for chemical processors running in classified areas. Here is how the three pieces fit, and why the fit matters.

Choosing a DO Sensor for Bench-Scale Fermentation and Bioreactor Research

Bench-scale fermentation lives or dies on dissolved oxygen control, and the sensor is where that control starts. Pick the wrong DO sensor for a small bioreactor and you introduce drift mid-run, sterilisation damage, or readings that will not reproduce across studies. That is a serious problem when reproducibility is the whole point of the work.

This article sets out the practical choices: optical versus amperometric sensing, the case for digital Memosens connectivity, what to look for in fit and integration, and how to buy for a whole research group rather than a single experiment. Whether you are running a 2-litre vessel or scaling towards pilot work, the decision is worth making carefully at the start.

Sizing a Control Valve to IEC 60534 in CONVAL, Start to Finish

TL;DR: Sizing a control valve in CONVAL 12 follows the order of the module's own navigation: define the medium and its state, enter the operating point, let CONVAL fill in the fluid properties, describe the pipeline either side of the valve, then configure the valve and read the result. The software applies IEC 60534 for you and reports what matters in the Overview pane: the flow state, the flow type, the required Kv, the stroke position, the predicted sound pressure level and the reliability index. You size to the duty; CONVAL tells you whether that duty is survivable.

Dissolved Oxygen Measurement in University Research Laboratories

University and research-institute laboratories sit at an awkward point for instrumentation. The science demands precision and traceable data; the budgets, sample sizes and timescales are nothing like a production plant. Dissolved oxygen comes up constantly in research settings, from cell culture and fermentation to environmental water work, and getting it right at bench scale has its own particular challenges that are quite different from anything a process engineer would recognise.

At DP-Flow we work with both research groups and the process teams they eventually supply data to. That dual perspective has shaped how we think about DO measurement in the lab, and it is worth setting out where the real difficulties lie, and what the instrumentation choices look like when you are trying to produce results that will stand up in a paper or a regulatory dossier.

When a Vendor's Own Software Says 'Pass' and CONVAL Says 'Retire

TL;DR: Yes, two valve-sizing tools can produce different verdicts on the same valve in the same duty. Vendor sizing software is typically designed to select and size valves from that manufacturer's own catalogue; it is commercially incentivised to return a "pass" for whatever it has to sell. An independent tool such as CONVAL 12 by F.I.R.S.T. GmbH applies the same calculation methodology regardless of who made the valve: IEC 60534-2-1 for flow capacity, IEC 60534-8-3 and 8-4 for noise, ISA-RP75.23 and the CONVAL Reliability Index for cavitation and choked-flow prediction. When a vendor tool and an independent tool disagree, the burden of investigation sits with the vendor, not with the engineer who ran the independent check.

One Transmitter, Many Measurements: The Protos II 4400 Modular Platform

Most transmitters do one job. They measure one parameter, report it to a DCS or PLC, and that is the end of the conversation. If the process changes, or compliance requirements grow, or you want to add a second parameter to the same location, you buy another transmitter. The loop gets more complex, the cabinet gets busier, and the wiring cost climbs quietly in the background.

The Knick Protos II 4400 is built on a different premise. It is a modular, 4-wire platform that you configure for the measurements and connectivity your process actually needs, then extend with software as requirements grow. At DP-Flow we have specified it at the centre of pH, conductivity and dissolved oxygen loops across a range of regulated and industrial environments, and it is worth understanding why the modular concept matters before committing to a transmitter architecture.

Fit-for-purpose control valves: lessons from a petrochemical audit

TL;DR: A control valve that "passes" a vendor's own sizing software may still be wrong for the application. Industry experience from petrochemical projects shows that a meaningful proportion of control valves in any given package are not genuinely fit for purpose, and that the problems only surface during commissioning - when fixing them is most expensive. An independent, multi-criteria sizing tool used systematically at the engineering stage catches these mismatches early. CONVAL 12, developed by F.I.R.S.T. GmbH, applies exactly this kind of structured, vendor-neutral analysis. This post explains why fitness-for-purpose audits matter and how calculation tools that are independent of any valve manufacturer support them.