Category: General

  • 32.4 High-reliability control systems

    As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, instrumentation safety may be broadly divided into two categories: the safety hazards posed by malfunctioning instruments, and special instrument systems designed to reduce safety hazards of industrial processes. This section regards the first category. All methods of reliability improvement incur some extra cost on the operation, whether…

  • 32.3 Practical measures of reliability

    In reliability engineering, it is important to be able to quantity the reliability (or conversely, the probability of failure) for common components, and for systems comprised of those components. As such, special terms and mathematical models have been developed to describe probability as it applies to component and system reliability. 32.3.1 Failure rate and MTBF Perhaps…

  • 32.2 Concepts and laws of probability

    While the term “probability” may evoke images of imprecision, probability is in fact an exact mathematical concept: the ratio a specific outcome to total possible outcomes where 1 (100%) represents certainty and 0 (0%) represents impossibility. A probability value between 1 and 0 describes an outcome that occurs some of the time but not all of the…

  • Chapter 32 Industrial Process Safety and Instrumentation

    This chapter discusses instrumentation issues related to industrial process safety. Instrumentation safety may be broadly divided into two categories: how instruments themselves may pose a safety hazard (electrical signals possibly igniting hazardous atmospheres), and how instruments and control systems may be configured to detect unsafe process conditions and automatically shut an unsafe process down. In…

  • 31.8 Techniques for analyzing control strategies

    Control strategies such as cascade, ratio, feedforward, and those containing limit and selector functions can be quite daunting to analyze, especially for students new to the subject. As a teacher, I have seen first-hand where students tend to get confused on these topics, and have seen how certain problem-solving techniques work well to overcome these…

  • 31.7 Limit, Selector, and Override controls

    Another category of control strategies involves the use of signal relays or function blocks with the ability to switch between different signal values, or re-direct signals to new pathways. Such functions are useful when we need a control system to choose between multiple signals of differing value in order to make the best control decisions.…

  • 31.6 Feedforward with dynamic compensation

    As we have seen, feedforward control is a way to improve the stability of a feedback control system in the face of changing loads. Rather than rely on feedback to make corrective changes to a process only after some load change has driven the process variable away from setpoint, feedforward systems monitor the relevant load(s) and use…

  • 31.5 Feedforward control

    “Feedforward” is a rather under-used control strategy capable of managing a great many types of process problems. It is based on the principle of preemptive load counter-action: that if all significant loads on a process variable are monitored, and their effects on that process variable are well-understood, a control system programmed to take appropriate action based on…

  • 31.4 Relation control

    A control strategy similar to ratio control is relation control. This is similar to ratio control in that a “wild” variable determines the setpoint for a captive variable, but with relation control the mathematical relationship between the wild and captive variables is one of addition (or subtraction) rather than multiplication (or division). In other words, a relation…

  • 31.3 Ratio control

    Most people reading this book have likely had the experience of adjusting water temperature using two hand valves as they took a shower: one valve controlling the flow of hot water and the other valve controlling the flow of cold water. In order to adjust water temperature, the proportion of one valve opening to the other must…

  • 31.2 Cascade control

    A simple control system drawn in block diagram form looks like this: Information from the measuring device (e.g. transmitter) goes to the controller, then to the final control device (e.g. control valve), influencing the process which is sensed again by the measuring device. The controller’s task is to inject the proper amount of negative feedback…

  • Chapter 31 Basic Process Control Strategies and Control System Configurations

    In a simple control system, a process variable (PV) is measured and compared with a setpoint value (SP). A manipulated variable (MV, or output) signal is generated by the controller and sent to a final control element, which then influences the process variable to achieve stable control. The algorithm by which the controller develops its…

  • 30.6 Tuning PID Controllers

    Learning how to tune PID controllers is a skill born of much practice. Regardless of how thoroughly you may study the subject of PID control on paper, you really do not understand it until you have spent a fair amount of time actually tuning real controllers. In order to gain this experience, though, you need…

  • 30.5 A Comparison of PID Controller Tuning Techniques

    In this section I will show screenshots from a process loop simulation program illustrating the effectiveness of Ziegler-Nichols open-loop (“Reaction Rate”) and closed-loop (“Ultimate”) PID tuning methods, and then contrast them against the results of my own heuristic tuning. As you will see in some of these cases, the results obtained by either Ziegler-Nichols method…

  • 30.4 Heuristic PID Tuning Procedures

    In contrast to quantitative tuning procedures where definite numerical values for P, I, and D controller settings are obtained through data collection and analysis, a heuristic tuning procedure is one where general rules are followed to obtain approximate or qualitative results. The majority of PID loops in the world have been tuned with such methods, for better…