Think of how soft drinks and ice creams fill into a cup or cone exactly until it’s full, or how traffic lights work in the exact time interval over and over, or how alarms are activated in the event of a fire or smoke. In all of these examples, the instruments were intricately designed and monitored by instrumentation engineers. What is an instrumentation engineer? He or she plans, designs, constructs and maintains an instrumentation system. They work in all kinds of fields and mainly deal with the instrumentation of processes in places like refineries and chemical plants where they select, specify and purchase the instruments required, from simple pressure gauges to complex distributed control systems. They engage themselves in the development of the process and control diagrams and work closely with their counterparts in the client’s task force and also in the final reviews. They are part of the startup team that commissions the plant.

Professor A. Bhujanga Rao, from the Department of Instrumentation Engineering, Andhra University, said of the subject that “It is a multi-disciplinary stream and covers subjects from various branches such as chemical, mechanical, electrical, electronics and computers.” It can be defined as the science of the control and measurement of process variables in manufacturing or production. The nature of work ranges from designing, developing, installing, troubleshooting and problem solving, providing advice and consultancy support, developing new business proposals, and managing equipment used to monitor and control machinery and processes and also with the goal of improving the productivity, reliability, safety, optimization and stability of the system. Instrumentation engineers can find work in both the software and hardware sector, but they mostly work in the manufacturing and process industries like steel, petrochemical, power, defence or oil. These engineers might also find work in the avionics, aeronautical and space sectors.