Blog

Common Industrial Applications of P-Only Control

By dennisnash | October 8, 2015

Effective Disturbance Rejection
“When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” – a concept attributed to Abraham Maslow. Such can be the situation with process control and the PID controller. For decades practitioners have applied the PID to tackle the majority of challenges related to process control. Fortunately for practitioners the PID is more like a Swiss Army Knife as it can take different forms. The focus of this post is on a pair of applications of P-Only Control – or Proportional-Only Control.

What Is a Set Point Filter?

By dennisnash | September 29, 2015

Names – like looks – can be deceiving. While jumbo shrimp are big relative to other shrimp there’s very little about them that could be considered gargantuan. So there should be no surprise to learn that in the realm of process control a Set Point Filter has nothing to do with filtering noise within a control loop’s data.

How Can I Correct for Noise Using External Filters?

By dennisnash | September 22, 2015

Choices, choices. In the realm of process control practitioners are regularly forced to choose between competing options. Consider a PID control loop: Should it be tuned for faster disturbance rejection or tighter Set Point tracking? Should the Derivative Term be used or does the PI configuration provide a sufficiently fast Settling Time? And the choices go on and on. In that sense there are multiple choices for filtering noise too – options that provide very different benefits. Fortunately when it comes to filtering for Signal Noise the choice is typically clear.

How Can I Correct for Noise Using Internal Filters?

By dennisnash | September 15, 2015

Noise is inevitable. To one degree or another it’s evident in the data of most every production process. Sure it can be absent in academic settings and similar lab environments where simulations often generate sanitized data. However, in the real world of industrial manufacturing noise is a factor that cannot be avoided. Failing to account for or manage noise can be a recipe for – well – failure.