INSTRUMENTATION AND PROCESS CONTROL HANDBOOK: A Practical Guide to Measurement, Sensors, Transmitters, Control Loops, Valves, Calibration, Functional Safety and Operational Technology Cybersecurity

Why does that loop oscillate every time the production rate changes, and why is it still in manual six months later?

Have you adjusted tuning constants by feel, because nobody measured the process first?

Did your training end before digital field networks, the functional safety lifecycle and control-system security became your problem?

This handbook is a comprehensive working reference in sixteen chapters, arranged in four parts and ordered the way the work happens: measurement first, then the field device and its signal path, then control, then the disciplines that keep a plant defensible. It assumes algebra, enough calculus to follow a derivative and an integral, basic circuit fundamentals and introductory physics. It assumes no prior control theory.

It is written for upper-level undergraduate and technical-college students, for instrument technicians who want the theory behind procedures they already follow, and for control and maintenance engineers who need the parts of the discipline that arrived after their own training.

By the end you will be able to:

• Build a measurement uncertainty budget you can defend when someone asks how you know.
• Select sensing technology on evidence rather than on a headline specification.
• Identify a process model from a plant test, and judge what control performance it permits before choosing a setting.
• Diagnose a misbehaving loop from its trend, and separate a tuning fault from a mechanical one.
• Size and specify a final control element, and read what its diagnostics report about its condition.
• Assign and verify the integrity of a protective function, and partition a control system so a compromise cannot spread.

Plants now expect one engineer to cover measurement, control, protection and network security. Most training covered the first two. That gap is where a reading goes undefended in an audit, where a loop is quietly switched to manual and left there, and where a protective function runs on assumptions nobody has revisited since commissioning.

Every chapter builds on the one before it, and each stands alone when you need it to.

Add the Instrumentation and Process Control Handbook to your shelf, and start with the chapter that matches the problem in front of you today.