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Walk onto any bulk terminal or cement plant commissioned in the last two years and the control room tells the story: fewer operators, more screens, and a conveyor line that is expected to report its own health. Automation has moved from the weighing and routing systems into the safety layer, and that shift is quietly […]

If you specify conveyor protection, 2026 is the year the goalposts moved. Across Europe, North America and parts of Asia, machinery-safety frameworks are being revised to put stronger, more explicit weight on under-speed and broken-chain protection — the failure modes that used to be “nice to have” on a conveyor are quickly becoming “write it […]

Buyers searching for “conveyor protection” trip over three similar names: zero speed switch, speed switch, and slip switch. They sound like the same device with a different label, but they catch three different failures — and picking the wrong one leaves a real gap in your protection. I’ll set the three side by side, show […]

Every few weeks a plant engineer tells me the same story: a chain broke on their scraper conveyor, the line kept running for a few seconds, and by the time someone hit the stop button three meters of flight pan were wrecked. “How would a zero speed switch have prevented that?” they ask. The answer […]

If you build or sell machinery into the EU, put 20 January 2027 on the calendar. That is when Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 fully replaces the old Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC and becomes directly applicable across all member states. Unlike the directive it replaces, this regulation treats software, connectivity and cybersecurity as safety matters in their own […]

The predictive maintenance market is no longer a pilot curiosity. It has become one of the fastest-growing corners of industrial technology, and 2026 is the year the numbers stopped being debatable. According to The Business Research Company, the market grew from $11.82 billion in 2025 to $15.29 billion in 2026 — a 29.4% jump in […]

Vibration monitoring with accelerometers is the quiet workhorse behind most predictive maintenance programs, and it is also the easiest one to start small. A healthy rotating machine has a repeatable vibration signature; as bearings wear, couplings misalign or impellers go out of balance, that signature shifts weeks or months before anything actually breaks. Catch the […]

Picking the right industrial accelerometer is less about finding the “best” sensor and more about matching one to the machine in front of you. Engineers usually come to us with a symptom — a motor that sounds wrong, a tower that sways, a press that kicks — and the job is to translate that into […]

A service engineer I work with put it plainly last month: “The turbines we monitored five years ago and the ones going in the water now are almost different machines.” He is right. In July 2025 a Chinese consortium commissioned a 17 MW direct-drive floating offshore unit with a 262-meter rotor and a hub height […]

A procurement manager asked me a fair question last quarter: “Is structural health monitoring just hype, or are people actually buying it?” I pulled the latest market figures to answer him, and the numbers are not subtle. The global structural health monitoring (SHM) market reached 3.44 billion in 2025** and is forecast to reach **6.93 […]