Simple control valve diagnostic tool for Foundation Fieldbus technology

This paper presents a simple diagnostic tool for configuration and diagnosis the control valves that are Foundation Fieldbus devices. National Instrument, NI USB-8486 is the hardware which is designed to connect to Foundation Fieldbus segment and Labview software with NI FBUS Communications Manager API is used to develop the diagnostic tool for parameters checking, stroke testing, data logging for signature comparisons and offline analysis in the control valve. The tool not impacts with other Fieldbus devices and controller in the H1 segment. Therefore, the end user can use the tool online and offline in the segment and reduce engineering cost for expensive vendor's asset management software. In additional, the tool have developed to test step response of control valves that can be developed and applied to analyze effective factors or predict the maintenance in higher level.