A technological advance introduced in the late 1980’s was HART, an acronym standing for Highway…
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Human-machine interfaces, or HMIs, are a critical part of nearly all control systems, complementing the…
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Phasors are to AC circuit quantities as polarity is to DC circuit quantities: a way to express the…
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As we have seen, feedforward control is a way to improve the stability of a feedback control system in the…
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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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An extremely important topic in engineering is that of transfer functions. Simply defined, a transfer function…
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Although it seems each model of PLC has its own idiosyncratic standard for programming, there does exist an…
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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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The vast majority of PID controllers in service today are digital in nature. Microprocessors executing PID…
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Non-dispersive analysis, while newer in discovery than dispersive analysis (Isaac Newton’s 17th-century…
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One of the fundamental laws of electric circuits is Kirchhoff’s Current Law, which states the algebraic…
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Instrument technicians should not have to concern themselves over the programming details internal to digital…
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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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Hydrogen ion activity in aqueous (water-solvent) solutions is a very important parameter for a wide variety of…
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RTDs are completely passive sensing elements, requiring the application of an externally-sourced electric…
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Programmable logic controllers are essentially nothing more than special-purpose, industrial computers. As…
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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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When control valves operate between fully open and fully shut, they serve much the same purpose in process…
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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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As we have seen, the concept of integration is finding the accumulation of one variable multiplied by another…
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Volumes could be written about poor diagnostic technique. The following mistakes are not intended to comprise…
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Negative feedback systems, in general, tend to cause confusion for those first learning their fundamental…
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Learning how to tune PID controllers is a skill born of much practice. Regardless of how thoroughly you may…
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The final step in treating wastewater before releasing it into the natural environment is to kill any harmful…
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The majority of flowmeter technologies operate on the principle of interpreting fluid flow based on the…
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The efficient identification and correction of instrument calibration errors is an important function for…
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Finally, we arrive at the loop diagram (sometimes called a loop sheet) for the compressor surge control system…
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Process analyzers measure the concentration of specific substances for the purpose of measuring and/or…
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Perhaps the most basic and necessary protective relay function is overcurrent: commanding a circuit breaker to…
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Phasors are to AC circuit quantities as polarity is to DC circuit quantities: a way to express the…
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A much simpler alternative to continuous vibration sensors (displacement or acceleration) and monitoring…
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A simple control system drawn in block diagram form looks like this: Information from the measuring device…
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A level switch is one detecting the level of liquid or solid (granules or powder) in a vessel. Level switches…
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Control valves are supposed to deliver reliable, repeatable control of process fluid flow rate over a wide…
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A unique form of technical diagram for describing the abstract functions comprising a control system (e.g. PID…
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When I began teaching full-time in 1998, most of what I thought I understood about good teaching was actually…
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Any physical location in an industrial facility harboring the potential of explosion due to the presence of…
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The Law of Mass Conservation states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. The Law of Energy…
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All masses require force to accelerate (we can also think of this in terms of the mass generating a reaction…
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Disturbances in the liquid tend to complicate liquid level measurement. These disturbances may result from…
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