Tuning of Industrial Control Systems

This book is an Independent Learning Module (ILM) as developed and published by the Instrument Society of America. The ILMs are the principal components of a major educational system designed primarily for independent self-study. This comprehensive learning system has been custom-designed and created for ISA to more fully educate people in the basic theories and technologies associated with applied instrumentation and control. This ILM is designed to expose you to the techniques of tuning industrial control systems. AS are all other ILMs, it is written so that you can study it on your own. Although it is written from a practical rather than a theoretical point of view, the material is organized in each unit in a logical sequence so that you can easily see the reasons for the techniques that are presented. Tuning is an important phase of the implementation of automatic control systems. The best control strategies will perform poorly if they are poorly tuned. The most important point to be made in this ILM is that tuning is an approximate rather than a precise procedure. In other words, it is not necessary to know the tuning parameters to three significant figures; most of the time two or even one significant figure is sufficient. In short, "tune coarse, not fine" is an important slogan in this course.

ARMANDO B. CORRIPIO, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Louisiana State University. Dr. Corripio teaches undergraduate courses on automatic process control, unit operations, and plant design. He also teaches graduate courses on advanced process control and computer control techniques, and a special topics course on batch process design, scheduling, and control. Dr. Corripio's main research interests are in the application of computers for designing, controlling, and operating chemical processes. These interests fall into the broad areas of automatic process control theory, computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) and computer-aided process design (CAPD). In automatic process control theory, Dr. Corripio works in the development and tuning of computer control algorithms, process identification, auto-tuning, and adaptive control, and on the application of these techniques to multivariable process control problems.