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Our Special Correspondent

St Louis (Missouri) , Nov. 17

IMAGINE a million toilets flushed five times each day and all in the space of half an hour, as people at home get ready to go to school, office... and the lady of the house goes about organising breakfast and lunch.

Now, even by the standards of rationed usage that Indian sanitary-ware manufacturers specialise in, that shouldtranslate into 40 million litres of water coursing through the city's underground sewage system — a fifth perhapsof the water needs of a city like Chennai.

A city must design its sewage pumping capacity to handle this load occurring in such a short span of time. Quite easily achieved, you might say. True.

But the catch is this: The pumps designed for such a need would simply be wasted for the remaining 23 1/2 hours of the day — a bit like taking a garden shovel for a single scoop of a cup of Amul ice cream.

What is worse, it would be using up electricity at a rate that would put some of the gas guzzling SUVs on the American roads to shame.

Enter electric motor pumps with the intelligence built in to tune its operations and hence, its energy needs, to the ebb and flow in the sewage water coursing through its sub-terranean veins right through the day.

That is just one example of the innumerable innovative applications of automation in process control showcased at the latest Automation Fair 2005, which opened here on Thursday.

The show billed as the `gateway to manufacturing excellence' features products and software exhibits from over 100 manufacturers/suppliers besides Rockwell Automation USA, the principal sponsor of the event. Visitors to the fair had the opportunity to witness product applications through hand on user operation.

In addition, there were case studies of successful user implementation, and seminars on automation possibilities in a variety of enterprise business situations.

The 14th in the annual series of such fairs concludes on Friday.

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