Control loop tuning

The paper outlines a system called MASTERTUNE, which has been developed to automatically determine the necessary PID parameters by interfacing to existing plant controllers and automatically down loading the values upon completion of the tuning exercise. In addition, the development of commercial controllers which have a programmable facility, has provided the end users with the opportunity to implement customised control strategies thus eliminating the constraint of employing PID structures. Therefore, the second part of this paper outlines the features of the PRODESIGN package which provides a complete design environment allowing the user to implement advanced control strategies where required. In particular, it is well recorded that for a system with a large time delay, conventional control normally results in a sluggish oscillatory response. It has been shown that much better performance can be achieved by the new 'predictive' control algorithms. The strategy presented involves the PIP or PI Plus algorithm.