Instrumentation Engineering is a branch of physics primarily involved in dealing with measurement, monitoring and control of all the physical parameters discovered in nature and/or artificially made available.
The main industrially categorised parameters are Pressure, Temperature, Flow and Level. Other than this, parameters like pH, Conductivity, Vibration, Speed, Density, Humidity and Concentration are also taken care by this branch. Other than industrial process control activities, the other important aspect of this branch is to deal with Safety concepts and its implementation in an industrial environment/atmosphere. This safety comprises the safety of both the Personnel as well as of the instrument & equipments. Instrumentation Engineering is the mandatory requirement for successful running of any plant or industry as this branch also deals with integrated concepts and implementation related to other branches of engineering which are electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. These conceptual parameters are Voltage, Current, Resistance, Capacitance, Inductance from electrical engineering branch; whereas stress, strain, tension, force, equipment design from mechanical engineering.
Being a vast area of technical & industrial sector, instrumentation engineering is highly practiced & demonstrated in other expertise areas as per their conditions and regulations. Also, all these different areas of instrumentation have certain particular & specific instruments limited to their areas. The classification done here is based on major and global practices under the parent roof of instrumentation engineering. These five categories are:
- Field instrumentation – Field, nature of field, instruments as per field, engineering considerations as per field.
- Control system instrumentation – Automation and PLC, DCS and SCADA related information.
- Analytical instrumentation – Analysers mainly chromatographs and spectrometers.
- Nuclear instrumentation – Radiation detectors used in nuclear power plants.
- Biomedical instrumentation – Instruments used in hospitals & medical care centers.
Please refer articles on above listed categories. All these articles will give you an introduction overview about these respective classifications and nature of instrumentation involved in it. Other than above, as mentioned previously, another one important area of specialization is called safety instrumentation. Necessary safety studies are carried out in these studies. Safety integrity level (SIL) study is the primary name holder of this area. International standards like IEC provide the guidelines for analysis, study and assessment regarding the safety aspects of process , process instruments and hazards involved in all the stages of execution.
Instrumentation engineering is one of the only comprehensive engineering discipline where we come across multiple aspects, scenarios and activities of other engineering disciplines like mechanical, civil and electrical. For all the above stated aspects, this inter-disciplinary approach of study and execution, makes Instrumentation Engineering successfully the core requirement of Industries.