This month, DrivesMag asked North American process chemical plant designers and facility managers about their facilities and process lines. The answers to the question: What communication method do you use in your plants/processes? return some interesting insights into automation and control networks and the systems that define their work. Users were able to choose more than one answer and were given the choice of "other", but rarely selected it.

This research has a confidence factor of 90% and a confidence interval of 10%.

Industry Research Series - Current Focus: Batch and Specialty Chemicals

DrivesMag is working hard to better understand how automation, control and drives are currently being designed into and used in key industrial and manufacturing markets, assessing impact that they might have on the processes and value that they bring to users. Our focus this month is on the Batch and Specialty Chemical Markets.

If you are an expert in the field of chemical production, we'd like to ask you a few questions and will pay you for your time. Of course, we'll share our findings with you.

If you would like to participate in this study, please email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for a link. The survey should take no longer than 20 minutes to complete. When you have finished, you can choose to be paid $45 for your time, or to give the $45 plus a $10 matching donation from DrivesMag to one of three great charities. Your answers will remain anonymous and combined with answers from others in a final report that you can choose to receive. Nobody will contact you afterwards to sell anything.

Until 2009, Asia Pacific was still the smallest regional DCS (Distributed Control Systems) market, but it has grown quickly in the last few years, particularly in China and India. Although DCS revenues in EMEA and the Americas fell in the 2009 recession, the market in Asia Pacific still managed to continue to grow, despite a decline in Japan.  In this market, much of the revenues from Asia can be attributed to DCS hardware bought for greenfield projects, such as for addressing the energy and infrastructure needs of a growing population with more disposable income, and of continued urbanization in India and China.

An Analyst at IMS Research explains “Governments have been addressing the needs of the population with investment in various large-scale projects designed to provide more power and energy. This will be reflected in the above-average growth in DCS product revenues in the petrochemical, oil & gas, and power industries of the region. Plans in Asia Pacific to expand or install nuclear power capacity were much less affected than those of other parts of the world, by 2011’s Fukushima disaster in Japan. With higher disposable incomes, the demand for processed food and drink is projected to increase; thus sales of DCS for food and beverage processing equipment are also projected to grow at an above average rate. The investment in China is centered on its 12th Five Year-Plan, which addresses the growing need to shift China’s dependency on export to the development of an internal market.  In 2013, revenues in China from DCS products are projected to higher than those in Japan.”