Processing's Weekly Mixer: Processing's Photo of the Month, and more
Welcome to the latest installment of Processing's Weekly Mixer, which highlights recent content from EndeavorB2B brands relevant to process manufacturers.
This week's entry features content from Chemical Processing, Pharma Manufacturing, Plant Services and Control, as well as this week's content from Processing.
Processing’s Photo of the Month — July 2026
Processing’s Photo of the Month for July is this image taken by senior editor Nate Todd of the former Ardent Mills grain silos in Mankato, Minnesota. The silos dominate the downtown skyline of the small city, which is situated at the confluence of the Minnesota and Blue Earth Rivers in southern Minnesota. While the photo is not artistic itself, the silos provide the canvas for a monumental mural painted by the Australian artist Guido van Helten, who specializes in painting enormous murals on buildings, silos, and other large structures.
How microgrids and battery storage help chemical plants cut energy costs and outage risk
Chemical manufacturers and other industrial customers have seen increased business risk from power outages, even in the U.S., where the grid is considered one of the most reliable globally, according to Ron Beck, senior solutions marketing director for Emerson’s AspenTech business, in a 2024 webinar on power reliability.
At the same time, global electricity demand is rising, and the growing share of renewable electricity is shifting the grid from one-way to two-way flow — subject to more fluctuation in supply and demand and adding complexity to power management, Beck said.
“Even brief outages can result in significant production losses, safety risks and extended restart times,” said Sarang Gadre, global head, Energy Control & Management, Honeywell Process Automation, which includes Honeywell’s power automation solutions and battery energy storage systems (BESS).
Brief voltage or frequency deviations can trip compressors, pumps or reactors, causing costly and hazardous upsets, added Tessy Tuschen, business development manager for Grid Technologies at Siemens Energy.
The cost of outages, along with the opportunity to optimize energy cost and track renewable energy use, is driving adoption of microgrids at chemical manufacturing and other industrial facilities. The rapid construction of data centers is compounding the problem: it's straining utility grids, limiting available capacity for industrial expansion and accelerating demand for onsite generation, renewables and distributed microgrid systems, said Robert Link, vice president of Automation Systems at M.C. Dean, a systems integrator. Today’s microgrid controllers from several vendors allow control of diverse energy sources, but implementation is still developing and is not a simple task, he said.
Thermo Fisher capitalizes on biopharma’s adoption of single-use technology
Life sciences company Thermo Fisher Scientific is targeting the growing bioproduction market, which spans the full cycle from cell culture media and single-use technologies — including its DynaDrive single-use bioreactor platform — to filtration, purification, and production chemicals.
CEO Marc Casper told analysts during last week’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call that bioproduction remains a “great space” for Thermo Fisher, while acknowledging “there are a number of fine players” serving the market. Bioproduction is a “key enabling technology” especially as the sector moves “towards single use” for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, Casper said.
“We play a key role — we’ve launched a number of innovative technologies,” according to Casper, who called out Thermo Fisher’s DynaDrive single-use bioreactors which he contends are “getting more and more standardized” across the contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) landscape.
“That’s a super important indicator because it basically says that it drives efficient production of medicines,” Casper added. “It’s also being adopted in innovative pharmaceutical companies. CDMOs, they make all their money, including our own, on how well you run your operations. DynaDrive is quickly becoming the favored technology, and that bodes well for the follow-on consumable stream that comes from that as well.”
Ask a Plant Manager: Stopping maintenance shortcuts before they become reliability problems
How process control engineers can separate real process changes from measurement noise
- Noise can result from sensor turbulence, vibration, incomplete mixing, sampling frequency or other transient effects.
- Regular calibration, accounting for sensor nonlinearities, and selecting the appropriate filtering technique are essential for maintaining data integrity.
- Consider displaying the raw process variable to operators while using a filtered signal for control algorithms.
Read Part 2 HERE.
Read Part 1 HERE.
