Knowledge Center: Process Control
In industrial operations, product quality, economic production, worker safety, environmental impact minimisation all require multiple process variables to be maintained at or close to their desired values. This is the primary job of the the brain of the process plant – the Control System. And as this section of the Knowledge Center explores and explains, today’s open and integrated process control systems have gone far beyond providing basic regulatory control, to become powerful, intelligent platforms working to deliver and ensure profitable plant operations.
Process ControlA Question of Migration
At a recent automation supplier user group, a speaker cited an interesting statistic. He said that 50 percent of the DCS (distributed control system) platforms running process plants today are at least 20 years old. More >
Automating PID Loop Tuning
A proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller operating in a feedback loop can be very effective at driving a measured process variable towards a desired setpoint, but only if the controller is adjusted or tuned to accommodate the behavior of the controlled process. More >
Control System Migration: Protecting Investments, Lowering Risks
For industrial companies, improving the performance and business results of Brownfield plants through control system migration has become an important strategic initiative. More >
Advanced Control Delivers High Performance
In 2005, Shanghai SECCO PC Ltd. started up a new EBSM unit in Caojing, Shanghai with a production capacity of 500,000 tes per year. More >
Profit from the Loop
There was a time when “control loop optimization” meant selecting the proportional, integral, and derivative tuning parameters for all of the PID controllers in a plant so as to optimize the closed-loop performance of each loop individually. More >
The Basics of Feedback
Arguably, the most basic tool of the control engineering profession is the feedback loop, shown below. More >
