Let's continue our 5 Questions for an Emerson Expert podcast series with Mark Coughran. Mark has decades of experience in process automation and optimization. We've shared some of Mark's experience and client engagements here on the blog. In this podcast, you'll hear how he started at the control valve in his journey in gaining experience to optimize entire plants. He offers guidance for new engineers entering the field of process automation.

Send me feedback with a comment below if there is a particular Emerson expert you'd like to hear from and any specific questions you'd like me to ask them.

Transcript

Jim: Hi, everyone. I'm Jim Cahill, and welcome to our "5 Questions for an Emerson Expert" podcast series. Today, I'm joined by Mark Coughran. Mark is a process control consultant with decades of experience in process automation and optimization. He's consulted with clients across the spectrum of industries, from Life Sciences to upstream and downstream hydrocarbon production and processing. Welcome, Mark.

Mark: Hello, Jim. Thanks for bringing me in today.

Jim: Well, let's start out. As you were growing up, what led you to study in the field of STEM—science, technology, engineering and math, I guess, specifically, mechanical engineering in your case?

Mark: Well, it was just the machinery around the household that got me interested, my mom's washing machine and my sister's bicycles. I started fixing those, taking them apart. In that way, I became interested in more and more complex machines like automobiles, and that led me naturally into the mechanical engineering degree program.

Jim: Okay, that's great. So, what led you from there, specifically, into the world of process automation and optimization?

Mark: Well, it was a gradual process of learning about adjacent spaces or related topics. I went to graduate school to work on fluid mechanics because I'd become interested in that topic, thanks to a summer job where I worked in an ice machine factory. So, we had refrigerants flowing and water flowing and air flowing, and I decided I would study that topic in graduate school. And at the end of that, I joined a Navy laboratory to do research on turbulent flows. And then, when I realized that my family needed to live somewhere else, I heard about this company called Fisher Controls, which, shortly after I joined them, became an Emerson division.

So, at Fisher Controls, I worked in the laboratory starting with flow issues, and then I became interested in not just the valves, but the actuators and positioners that go on the valves and how all that works together. Built a laboratory to test things that way, which was the first time for that in our industry, and then we started getting data from customers where they had problems with the control loop. So, you can kind of see the picture expanding, right? We have the control valve goes out on the field. It's installed in piping. It has fluid flowing through it. It's connected to a transmitter and a controller. All these other things are happening, and customers had problems with these control loops, sometimes blaming that incorrectly on the control valve, which Fisher had supplied.

So, I started learning how to analyze the data from the plant, and I took some training courses from a company called Entech, which Emerson also acquired a few years later. And I became interested in the performance of the loop as a whole, and then came over to the Process Systems and Solutions Group, where I work now, with you, Jim. And I've been doing troubleshooting and optimization of control loops and the unit around the control loops ever since then.

Jim: That's really interesting. It's like the story of growing up, how you started taking apart things, and more complex and more complex as you went along and, similarly, starting with the basic final control and building it up from there.