Laboratory automation
Laboratory automation is a special field of automation technology. It deals with the automation of laboratory processes in the chemical, biological, pharmaceutical and food technology as well as in medicine.
The term laboratory automation (and Laboratory automation ) was coined in the seventies in the chemical industry. The laboratory automation was originally created to perform the automated in laboratory syntheses previously performed manually chemical process engineering unit operations such as stirring, temperature control, metering, etc., as well as registering and monitoring the readings. The goal was through automated driving to improve the reproducibility, and to save costs. The first "automatic lab reactors " consisted of a glass reactor, a heating / cooling thermostat, at least one metering system ( eg metering pump ) for the defined addition of reactants or for pH control, electric stirrer and possibly other glass structures, sensors and laboratory equipment. The sensors (eg temperature and pH), actuators (pumps and valves) and equipment (stirrers and heating / cooling thermostat) were connected via a so-called process interface with a computer, the control processes that capture the measured values and If necessary process variables (pH, temperature) could regulate.
Today, the term laboratory automation spans a wide range in the chemical, biotechnical and the food and beverage industry and is in no way more clearly. The devices and programs for Laboratory Automation differ substantially depending on whether they are used to automate a process laboratory process, such as a laboratory reactor system or automation of analytical laboratories. Accordingly, the Laboratory Automation providers who specialize in rule in the areas of synthesis or analysis.
Many working processes in a modern laboratory can be carried out by computer-assisted laboratory automation systems. This includes the automatic execution of measurements of all kinds (with the help of suitable sensors and analyzers ), the control of the actuators (pumps, valves, robots, etc. ), automatically performing the laboratory journal and filtering, analysis and presentation of information from databases. To bring a computer to automatically perform the necessary operations, simple and yet powerful and versatile programming languages are required. Standard programming languages such as Basic, C or Delphi are just bad for these tasks, since they as important features the time-dependent commands for the realization of timed processes and the multitasking ability missing. Normal automation languages are in principle, however, are too complicated for ordinary users to use the laboratory.
Once it was realized that in the laboratory and pilot scale, to expand beyond that of the traditional process control systems (PCS ) payments made basic functions such as collecting metrics, control and regulation, the requirements of increasingly sophisticated control functions, the working group has 2.4 of the Standards committee for measurement and control technology in the chemical industry (NAMUR ) the requirements for the process control systems in research and development in the worksheet NA 27 systematically compiled. These include, inter alia, options for logging and analysis, to optimize the process sequence, or for easy configuration by non- professionals. In the NAMUR recommendation NE 28 " recommendation for the implementation of electrical connectors for the analog and digital signal transmission to laboratory instrumentation and control individual devices, " the working group 2.4 is required that the instrumentation components (sensors, actuators, laboratory equipment, etc.) by the laboratory personnel with no wiring work confusable can be connected to the automation system.