In the United States, the most common language used to program PLCs is Ladder Diagram (LD), also known as…
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“Feedforward” is a rather under-used control strategy capable of managing a great many types of…
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Human-machine interfaces, or HMIs, are a critical part of nearly all control systems, complementing the…
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Instrument technicians should not have to concern themselves over the programming details internal to digital…
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Perhaps the most valuable skill an instrument technician can possess is the ability to efficiently diagnose…
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Perhaps the most basic and necessary protective relay function is overcurrent: commanding a circuit breaker to…
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As we have seen, the concept of differentiation is finding the rate-of-change of one variable compared to…
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A technological advance introduced in the late 1980’s was HART, an acronym standing for Highway…
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The two “process variables” we rely on most heavily in the field of electrical measurement and…
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There are many process control applications in the industry where it is desirable to have multiple control…
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The Law of Continuity for fluids states that the product of mass density (\(\rho\)), cross-sectional pipe area…
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As previously defined, calibration refers to the checking and adjustment of an instrument so that its output…
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As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, instrumentation safety may be broadly divided into two…
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Programmable logic controllers are essentially nothing more than special-purpose, industrial computers. As…
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Diagnostic ability is arguably the most difficult skill to develop within a student, and also the most…
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Light is known to interact with matter in very specific ways, which may be exploited as a means of measuring…
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Valves can experience a number of problems, most of them either preventable or repairable. These problems can…
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The simple PLC ladder diagram (LD) commands consist of contacts and coils, arranged in sequences that mimic…
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The vast majority of PID controllers in service today are digital in nature. Microprocessors executing PID…
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Recall that an exothermic chemical reaction is one that releases a net sum of energy, as opposed to an…
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A bridge circuit is basically a pair of voltage dividers where the circuit output is taken as the difference…
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(Will be addressed in future versions of this book)
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Any conductor possesses a characteristic called inductance: the ability to store energy in the form of a…
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Measuring the flow rate of liquid through an open channel is not unlike measuring the flow rate of a liquid…
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Perhaps the most basic and necessary protective relay function is overcurrent: commanding a circuit breaker to…
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The disadvantages of pneumatic instruments are painfully evident to anyone familiar with both pneumatic and…
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Feedback obtained from industrial users of FF reveal a common pattern: Fieldbus is a powerful and reliable…
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The following animation shows how a radio-energy pulse travels down and then up the waveguide of a guided-wave…
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A temperature switch is one detecting the temperature of some substance. Temperature switches often use…
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Data-processing modules within FF systems are known as function blocks. Sometimes these blocks serve merely to…
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Capacitance Any two electrical conductors separated by an insulating medium possess the characteristic called…
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An important design parameter of a control valve is the position it will “fail” to if it loses…
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Coy, John J. et. al. (December 2012) Sampled graphic illustrations from his NASA Reference Publication…
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A fundamental principle in instrumentation system troubleshooting is that every instrument has at least one…
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A pneumatic controller receives a process variable (PV) signal as a variable air pressure, compares that…
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“Feedforward” is a rather under-used control strategy capable of managing a great many types of…
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Virtually any mass above absolute zero temperature emits electromagnetic radiation (photons, or light) as a…
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There is much to be said for neatness of assembly in electrical signal wiring. Even though the electrons…
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Many traditional flowmeter technologies respond to the volumetric flow rate of the moving fluid.…
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Imagine a liquid-level control system for a vessel, where the position of a level-sensing float directly sets…
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Imagine a major marathon race, where hundreds of runners gather in one place to compete. When the starting gun…
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Non-dispersive analysis, while newer in discovery than dispersive analysis (Isaac Newton’s 17th-century…
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The following animation shows a rotating phasor in three-dimensional form. The phasor rotates in a complex…
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Once while working as an instrument technician in an aluminum foundry, a mechanic asked me what it was that I…
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Capacitance Any two electrical conductors separated by an insulating medium possess the characteristic called…
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All substances are comprised of various elements in various combinations and proportions. Elements may thus be…
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A quantitative PID tuning procedure is a step-by-step approach leading directly to a set of numerical values…
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First, let us review some of the properties of differentials and derivatives, referencing the expression and…
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AC induction motors are based on the principle of a rotating magnetic field produced by a set of stationary…
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While 50 and 51 (instantaneous and time overcurrent) relay functions monitor line current magnitude and guard…
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Perhaps the simplest form of solid or liquid level measurement is with a float: a device that rides on the…
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Feedback obtained from industrial users of FF reveal a common pattern: Fieldbus is a powerful and reliable…
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One of the simplest classes of temperature sensor is one where temperature effects a change in electrical…
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Tube, like pipe, is a hollow structure designed to provide an enclosed pathway for fluids to flow. In the case…
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Perhaps the most valuable skill an instrument technician can possess is the ability to efficiently diagnose…
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Most people reading this book have likely had the experience of adjusting water temperature using two hand…
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There is much to be said for neatness of assembly in electrical signal wiring. Even though the electrons…
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The digital multimeter (DMM) is quite possibly the most useful tool in the instrument technician’s…
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Converting between disparate units of measurement is the bane of many science students. The problem is worse…
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