The ISA104 Device Integration committee was established to develop or adopt, and to facilitate the application of standards and technical reports that represent device and interface descriptions for access of field devices in automation systems. In 2012 the scope of the committee was expanded to include the promotion of the Field Device Integration (FDI) standard, …
Category Archive: Distributed Control Systems (DCS)
Jun
10
Application of Kalman Filtering in DeltaV
A paper published in 1960 by Rudolf Kálmán “A New Approach to Linear Filtering and Prediction Problems” is the basis for the Kalman Filter. The Kalman filter has been successfully used in a wide variety of applications: • The guidance of commercial airplanes • Seismic data processing • Nuclear power plant instrumentation • Vehicle navigation …
Jun
03
Robustness-Based Tuning
Before tuning calculations are applied in a control loop, it is good to consider how much the process gain and deadtime can change before the loop becomes unstable. In the DeltaV control system, this information is provided using a robustness plot that shows gain margin and phase margin as illustrated below. Information on this type …
May
20
Surge Tank Control
Intermediate liquid storage tanks (surge tanks) are commonly installed between processing areas of the plant. Under normal operating conditions, these storage buffers allow each process area to be operated independently of the other process areas. Any imbalance in the area production rates within a plant will be reflected by a change in level of the …
May
06
On-demand Tuning Example
Control system manufacturers have adopted different technologies to implement on-demand tuning. Because these tools are designed to work in a noisy process measurement environment, the tuning results are usually better than those achieved through manual tuning techniques. To illustrate the features that may be included in on-demand tuning capability, the on-demand tuning capability of the …
Apr
29
Selecting Control Response
After the process characteristics are identified, the information is then used to calculate the recommended loop tuning. The tuning rules used to derive controller parameters from process characteristics can be chosen as appropriate for the specific process and the desired speed of response. As addressed in Chapter 4 of Advanced Control Foundtion – Tools, Techniques, …
Apr
22
Capturing Process Dynamics
When the on-demand tuning application resides in a DCS workstation, communications between the controller and the workstation can introduce variable delay and jitter in the observed process response. As addressed in Chapter 4 of Advanced Control Foundation – Tools, Techniques, and Applications, the process may be more accurately identified by distributing the on-demand tuning functionality …









