HMI symbols by industry
A good HMI symbol is generic by design: the same pump, gate or motor block works in any plant. What changes per industry is the subset you actually need and the process context around it. These pages walk each vertical's process train block by block, list the equipment symbols per stage, and point you to symbols other engineers have published (CC BY 4.0) or to the free Symbol Builder when the one you need doesn't exist yet.
Water & Wastewater
Intake pumps, headworks, primary clarification, aeration blowers, sludge dewatering, scrubbers, disinfection.
Food & Beverage
CIP/SIP, fillers, pasteurizers, mixers, brew kettles, fermenters, conveyors, packaging line servos.
Mining & Bulk Solids
Primary crushing, ball mills, conveyors (belt/screw/apron/bucket), cyclones, slurry pumps, dust collection.
Utility & Thermal Coming soon
Boilers, fired heaters, condensers, cooling towers, turbogenerators, distillation columns.
Pharmaceutical Coming soon
Bioreactors, autoclaves, lyophilizers, pure-water systems, USP/EP-grade equipment.
Don't see your industry?
Equipment symbols don't care which plant they run in. Browse the community library by category (motors, valves, pumps, tanks, process, instrumentation) instead of by industry.
Three places a symbol can come from
Symbols published by other engineers
Equipment drawings (pumps, valves, motors, tanks, process units) shared under CC BY 4.0. Download PNG/SVG, credit the author. Free plan: 5 downloads a month.
Symbol BuilderDraw the one that doesn't exist yet
Free, in the browser. Shapes, ISA-101 palette, snap grid, layers. Export PNG/SVG or publish it so the next plant doesn't have to redraw it.
Icon libraryGeneric HMI iconography
Alarm badges, state badges, ISA-5.1 instrument bubbles, connection lines, arrows, indicators, navigation icons. The parts every screen needs regardless of industry.
Suggest an industry
Working in pulp & paper, oil & gas, chemicals, automotive? Post your typical equipment list in the forum (or email it) and I'll write the page. Questions about a specific plant go in the forum too.
What every industry page covers
- Process train walkthrough — block-by-block from raw material to discharge, with the equipment symbols each block needs
- Where to get each symbol — a link to the matching category in the community library and to the Symbol Builder for the ones nobody has drawn yet
- Vertical-specific instrumentation — Coriolis for F&B, slurry density for mining, DO probes for aeration, etc.
- Generic iconography — which alarm badges, instrument bubbles and connection lines from the icon library fit that plant type
- Why ISA-101 matters — the operator-experience case for that specific plant type (high element counts, alarm floods, long shifts)
- State encoding — the one-INT-word-per-equipment convention (0 = Stopped … 8 = Fault) that every symbol on these pages assumes; full table in the 9 motor states guide