Education

In an earlier post, I discussed thought leadership as a reason you might consider using the people-to-people connecting social media applications like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. This topic is one of the items Deb Franke and I will be sharing in our Thriving in Chaos presentation at the Emerson Exchange.

Another topic will be ways to more effectively find the information you need to solve the issues in front of you. As we all know, there is absolutely no shortage of information. Our email inboxes overflow. The World Wide Web contains at least 25.45 billion pages of information as of June 23, 2009. If your desk looks anything like mine, well, it's not a pretty picture.

So how do you deal with this ever-growing flood of information to find what you need to solve the issues at hand? Of course, we all know about Google and the other search engines and have become well trained on the proper selection and amount of keywords and phrases to use. Sometimes this works great, sometimes not.

One big issue is that there's a lot of wisdom trapped in email inboxes and sent items folders. Desktop indexing and search software like Windows Search, Google Desktop, and many others can help to some extent. But what about the information others have that doesn't reach your email inbox?

Different approaches from content management systems to blogs, wikis, and forum software have been and are being tried with varying degrees of success. The key element to success seems to be the number of people willing to participate and the community that naturally forms from this participation. Metcalf's Law states, "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2)." He also offers:

...a more insightful and, I think, important contribution to the conversation -- that to understand the value of a social network we need to consider not just the number of users but also the affinity between the members of the network.

My take away? Your fastest path to the information you need to solve the issue at hand, if a Google search does not get a quick answer, is to try your social network--if you've built this network to sufficient size to realize the exponential effects described by Metcalf's Law.

Why is that? Beyond the social bonds you establish, with each connection you make, you are adding another human brain:

...containing about 10 billion nerve cells, or neurons. On average, each neuron is connected to other neurons through about 10 000 synapses. (The actual figures vary greatly, depending on the local neuroanatomy.) The brain's network of neurons forms a massively parallel information processing system. This contrasts with conventional computers, in which a single processor executes a single series of instructions.

If you use LinkedIn, use the Answers area to ask questions. You might also try answering some and building expertise credibility if your answer is selected as the best answer or a good answer. LinkedIn also has groups such as Automation Engineers Technical Group and Automation Engineers. Several automation suppliers have LinkedIn groups, such as Emerson's DeltaV group.

If you use Twitter, try posing your questions to those who choose to follow you. You'll grow your list of followers as you share interesting things about yourself and/or your expertise. Or if Twitter is not for you, try using some of the well-established email lists from ISA and Control.com.

As good as it is having more than 25 billion things at your fingertips, having trillions of massively parallel neural connections working with you is something you want to foster, strengthen, and grow.

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Attention 2009 Emerson Exchange (Sept 28-Oct 2) presenters--your presentations are due for review in a mere two weeks (June 26). This fact jolted me more than my typical few cups of coffee this morning.

I huddled with Emerson's Deb Franke to flesh out our Thriving in Chaos presentation. Given the trying economic times in which most businesses find themselves, it seems this chaos is not abating.

The presentations we've given in the past (2007, 2008) have focused more on the social media (a.k.a. Web 2.0) applications and the benefits of their use. This year we want to lift the focus to the results of what you may be trying to accomplish in your work and career, and how these applications can amplify your efforts.

One example is to better establish thought leadership around your expertise. ModelingAndControl.com's Greg McMillan wrote about this in his What Have I Learned? - Writing post. He shared:

I would guess 100 or more automation professionals are retiring each year who have published at best an infinitesimally small portion of their expertise for posterity.

It does not require a blog to build thought leadership around your area of expertise. It can be through email lists like ISA's Technical and Industry Discussion Lists, supplier product sites like our DeltaV LinkedIn and Facebook groups, comments on industry and automation blogs, or aggregated sites you might create such as the Process Safety Room in FriendFeed. In turn, this can lead to articles, mentions in books, podcasts, business press, and others who turn to you for your expertise.

Two short weeks and much thought baking to do--I'd better get going. If you're also presenting, best of luck in pulling yours together too!

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At the upcoming June 10-12, 2009 Automatic Control Conference, Emerson's Greg McMillan and Terry Blevins will be presenting, Bridging the Gap between Academia and Industry. Describing this session, Greg wrote on the ModelingAndControl.com blog:

The first semester I taught the Chemical Engineering course "Introduction to Process Dynamics and Control" at Washington University in Saint Louis as an adjunct professor, the students could not relate to my attempt to introduce practical plant applications and considerations in the normal course of Laplace transforms and bode plots. The second semester I added a virtual plant that consisted of a DeltaV DCS running in the Simulate mode integrated with HYSYS dynamic process simulations for each student. I later configured most of the process simulations directly in control studio. I was amazed how fast the students learned how to work in the graphical configuration environment and operator interface. All they needed was a few screen prints on navigation to get them started. Several of the students subsequently got intern or permanent positions doing configuration at the local DCS industry center. I had these students with experience in the automation industry come back to speak to the next class. The result was a dramatic turnaround in appreciation and understanding of what they would face in industry. The students decided on their own to go online to find and buy tee-shirts with Duncan, the DCS mascot, windsurfing. I ended up buying tee-shirts too and we all posed for a group photo by one of the students.

This got me thinking how technology has impacted the way we learn. For most of us mid-career and later, learning involved the journey Greg attempted in his first round with the class. We'd patiently learn parts and pieces with the hope that it would all be tied together in the end and become understandable.

He realized that this method was not effective in the world where answers to anything seem but a Google search away. The students he was teaching also had used near life-like video games for the better part of their teenage years. The effective way was to show with near life-like process simulations the big picture first and start the hands on process early. In the presentation, the authors describe this learning process: Explore ∗ Discover ∗ Prototype ∗ Demo ∗ Improve ∗ Deploy ∗ Educate

In the paper that accompanies their presentation, Greg and Terry describe this virtual plant:

The "virtual DCS" is not an emulation or translation but is a virtual replication of a complete DCS with all of the standard and optional advanced tools. Control system trend charts, displays, configurations are exchanged between a "hardware DCS" and "virtual DCS" by standard copy, import, export, and download functions. The incorporation of process models in a "virtual DCS" creates a "virtual plant", which offers an opportunity to integrate and build process knowledge with the "state of the art" advanced tools for Process Analytical Technology (PAT) and Advanced Process Control (APC)...

The entire lineup of Bridging the Gap presentations looks quite impressive and includes professors from the University of Texas at Austin, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Purdue University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Last month, I covered the Rose-Hulman unit operations presentation.

If you're responsible or involved in the process of educating tomorrow's process manufacturing engineers, this might be a conference for you.

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I received an email notice from the Emerson Global Users Exchange (a.k.a. Emerson Exchange) board, letting me know that on-line registration is now open. You have until August 17^th of this year to save 25% on your registration fee.

The Emerson Exchange will be September 28^th through October 2^nd at the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. This year's conference theme Engaging Minds. Amazing Results. is described in the email:

In these challenging economic times, as our companies press for increased productivity, energy efficiency, and lower production costs, automation professionals can truly shine by Engaging their Minds to achieve Amazing Results! There's no better place to discover a new idea, discuss solutions with subject matter experts, and prepare for the upcoming technological advances in process control.

The conference will include over 300 sessions offering best practices, implementation successes, tips and tricks, and proven project methodologies. Tracks include Business Operations & System Integration, Asset Optimization / Maintenance & Reliability, System Applications, Project Management & Engineering Tools, Control System Modernization, Instrumentation Applications, Process Optimization, Valves Applications, Emerson Product/Services Updates, Safety Systems & Instrumentation, Education Services Training Courses, and Wireless.

Within these tracks, here's a preliminary agenda of the presentations, short courses, and workshops. More details of the individual sessions will be added over the coming months.

As I mentioned in a prior post, Deb Franke and I are again teaming up for a presentation, Gamechangers: How to Thrive in Chaos. This is a fitting topic for these interesting economic times in which we all find ourselves. If you have some thoughts on how you're dealing with this chaos, add a comment or shoot me an email.

Our presentation continues on our series of Emerson Exchange presentations on the benefits of applying social media applications to what you do.

I really look forward to seeing you in Orlando for great conversation and fun.

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If you're a process automation professional and you haven't been following Greg McMillan on the ModelingAndControl.com blog and his "What Have I Learned?" series of posts, you're not in the flow of great knowledge sharing. Here's the current list of posts:

• What Have I Learned? - Sharing Knowledge
• What Have I Learned? - Einstein and the Ultimate Limits for Loop Performance
• What Have I Learned? To Lag or Not to Lag?
• What Have I Learned? - Unexpected Wireless Benefits
• What Have I Learned? - Cascade Control -Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• What Have I Learned? - Manipulation of Multiple Flows Part 1 - Split Ranged Control, Part 2 - Valve Position Control, Part 3 - MPC
• What Have I Learned? - Ratio Control Part 1, Part 2
• What Have I Learned? - Cost and Source of Oscillations Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
• What Have I Learned? - Wiring and VFD Problems
• What Have I Learned? - Writing

If you have wrestled with any of these control strategies, I hope you'll find some of the experience Greg shares helps shortcut a path to a solution.

The first post in the series, Sharing Knowledge, ends with this exhortation for you to join the ranks of those who'll share their expertise:

What distinguish humans from other animals are the gifts through art and science to discover, create, and disseminate knowledge and beauty expanding our understanding and perception of the universe. Art and science can both get at the essence and create new entities that take on an essence of their own. Both improve the quality and level of life. For me, good technical writing is both art and science. Try doing a weekly blog on what you have learned. I bet if you stick with it you will find it rewarding and create something that takes on an existence of its own.

I liked Greg's shift from the technical aspects of process control to today's post on writing. Greg gives his reasons for sharing these posts:

The main point of this blog like all of my writing is to share what I have learned. My goal for next year is to help prevent significant expertise and knowledge in process automation from being lost forever. I would guess 100 or more automation professionals are retiring each year who have published at best an infinitesimally small portion of their expertise for posterity. Also, new engineers are facing special challenges. My sense is the new kid in the control room doesn't have the mentors or the internal technical training programs I took for granted. They may be thrown into the midst of a difficult problem with no guidance.

He then shares ten points on writing. I especially like number 9, Don't get hung up on perfect grammar or a perfect piece. It reminds me of the unsolicited advice I offered a fellow Twitterer expressing his frustration with writers block. I pointed him to the Cult of the Done Manifesto.

I'd like to say great minds think alike, but I'll not go anywhere near there when I'm writing about Greg!

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As I mentioned in an earlier "itchy publish button" post, it's always dangerous to include a blogger on your email distributions for upcoming items. I saw an advanced copy of a 2009 American Control Conference paper prepared by Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology's Atanas Serbezov and Ronald Artigue and Emerson local business partner, Cornerstone Control's Ron Knecht. The abstract for this paper, Bridging the Gap between Academia and Industry is:

This presentation describes the deployment of an industrial Process Automation System (PAS), in the Chemical Engineering Unit Operations (UO) laboratory at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and its incorporation in the undergraduate curriculum. The UO laboratory has over a dozen of pilot-scale process units (skids) and creates an environment very similar to a typical chemical, petrochemical or pharmaceutical plant. Students learn how to maintain their process under control, take it safely from one operating condition to another, collect and analyze data using a process historian, respond to process alarms and remotely troubleshoot their experiments with limited process information.

Rose Hulman's Chemical Engineering department's UO lab is 6500 square feet, includes process operations such as heat exchangers, pumps, a distillation column, chemical reactors filtration units, and a fermentor. The DeltaV system on which the students learn process control is physically separated from the campus local area network. The students do have remote access to the engineering stations and operator stations and wireless access within the Chemical Engineering building.

The units are outfitted with various measurement technologies. For example, flow is measured with Coriolis, vortex shedding, and orifice/differential pressure technology. Level is measured with ultrasonic and differential pressure instruments.

Three upper division courses are available which teach process control through experiment, data analysis, report writing, and oral presentations. Here's an example of one of the experiments described in the paper:

...in the tubular reactor experiment, the control system can maintain the flow rate through the reactor at set point very well, but the process will become unstable if a set point change from laminar to turbulent regime is executed in automatic mode. In this situation students have to switch from automatic to manual mode and move the system manually towards the new operating conditions.

The paper describes the professors' work with the collaboration of many industrial partners, including Cornerstone Controls and Emerson. In addition to equipment, they received technical advice from the control system architecture to the design of experiments and its associated documentation. Additional work is being looked at to bring virtual plant capabilities into the curriculum.

I was very impressed with the paper and what's being done at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology to prepare the next generation of process control and automation engineers. The paper will be presented June 10-12, 2009 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

Our internal blogs at Emerson (blogs.emersonprocess.com for those readers with access to the Emerson internal network) are vibrant and growing. One of the folks I've featured in past posts, Jeff Hackney, who leads the DeltaV operator training solutions (DeltaV OTS) global sales team, has joined the ranks of internal bloggers.

In one of his posts, he highlights an OTS team project that delivers a complete operator training solution. This operator training system supports 4 butane splitter columns, butane butylene treater unit, propane propylene treater unit and utilities (cooling water system, steam/condensate system) for a U.S.-based refiner.

The simulation includes a dynamic model with startup and shutdown exercises and 33 training scenarios to help prepare the operators to work through simulated abnormal plant situations. Instructor graphics allow the refinery instructor to perform activities such as isolation valves opening and closing, and manual drain and filling valves not controlled from the plant DeltaV automation system.

Another post describes an operator training solution for an offshore oil and gas producer. This training solution supports two offshore platform wellheads and all downstream process areas through to sales gas to the pipeline company. In addition to the platform dynamic models, the OTS team also emulated safety instrumented system (SIS) shutdown logic. For this oil & gas producer, the team developed 47 training scenarios including startup and shutdown, instructor graphics, deck operations graphics, and random scenario generation. The random scenario generation allows the operators to train on the system without an instructor.

Jeff notes that some believe that building a large, dynamic simulation model and integrating it with various emulated or simulated control systems is a relatively simple activity that can be grasped within a few days. The reality is that updating a complex process model needs a detailed understanding of the process itself, simulation technology, the automation system and a design for the interaction between these components. It takes a combination of skills that most individuals usually do not possess. The OTS team works with process manufacturers to augment the skills within the plant to develop and maintain these operator training solutions.

Operator training systems become increasingly important as experienced operators retire and new ones join the ranks. Having instructor-led or instructor-less training systems can help develop the skills needed to handle abnormal plant situations when they arise.

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I came upon these statistics on the growth of social media applications, often dubbed Web 2.0:

Propelled by the growth of Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp., social networks are now more popular than e-mailing on the Internet, according to a Nielsen study.

I mention this because Emerson's Deb Franke and I were honored to be asked by Control Engineering Asia group editor, Bob Gill, to write on the topic of Web 2.0. We believe these people-connecting applications can help you and other process-manufacturing professionals better connect, engage, and advance. The article, The World of Web 2.0, shares our thoughts that today, more than ever, you should consider the use these applications for:

...finding answers faster, easily connecting with other experts outside your current sphere, discovering new things you didn't even know to look for, and having collective wisdom shape and improve initial ideas.

In this article, we shared many of the key thoughts from our presentation at last year's Emerson Exchange. The social media applications we highlight include LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Google Reader, and Google specialized news and blogs searches. I'll touch on a few thoughts we shared.

LinkedIn helps you grow and foster a network of professional and personal relationships. We wrote:

The value of building a LinkedIn network comes in several ways. The part we find most beneficial is the question and answer portion. When you ask questions, the question goes to everyone in your immediate network and is available for anyone in LinkedIn to answer. This circle of expertise extends far beyond whom you personally know. Also, as you answer questions, you begin to connect with others with similar expertise.

Twitter is a service where you can share what's on your mind with the world in a 140 characters or less. The power is in its simplicity. We wrote:

People find value from Twitter in many ways. The most common use is to ask questions to those who follow you when you need quick answers or advice. For example, a "has anyone seen this?" technical question is a fast way to begin troubleshooting. Business travelers can ask for recommended restaurants and advice in unfamiliar cities. You will find the value of Twitter grows as your network of followers expands and you learn more about them.

Flickr and YouTube for images and videos are both services I use with this blog to help convey ideas better than words alone can do. We also use it to share pictures of the DeltaV character, Duncan and for DeltaV videos and case studies.

The Google Reader provides a single spot to view anything you wish to subscribe and have flow to you, instead of having to seek and find. I've collected many process automation- and industry- related blogs and news feeds which you can import to your Google Reader or other RSS reader.

The specialized news and blog searches in Google provide great ways to find more current or good "how to" type information. They may get you to an answer faster than the overall search engines.

Deb and I conclude the article with this:

We believe innovation begins with curiosity and overcoming the comfort of the status quo. Give one or more of these Web 2.0 applications a try, and see what benefits you personally experience. Our hope is that you find new sources of innovation and success.

We hope you do!

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It is Spring Break week here in Austin, Texas for the schools and universities in the area. Unlike most people who did a family vacation, I took a couple of vacation days to attend the local SXSW Interactive conference. From their website:

Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!

I'm not sure about hard-core geek, but I consider myself at least in the ranks. There is also a film event and music event so creative folks are everywhere. My goal was to listen for ideas that I could "borrow" and apply to this blog, in other social media initiatives, or as part of the big, Emerson Exchange event.

The rapidly growing service, Twitter, blossomed several years ago at SXSWi. People discovered that it is a great way to share what they're learning in the sessions they attend, to announce and look for impromptu meet-ups, and to ask questions of the panelists during the panel session. To get a flavor for some of these examples and more, look at the Twitter search on the tag #sxsw. This means that anyone who uses this text sequence #sxsw among their 140 characters of wisdom will have their thoughts easily found by others using the same tagging convention.

At last year's Emerson Exchange, we used the tag, #EmEx. There are just a few remaining messages, but we had quite a number, from several people, during the event. I'd like to encourage everyone who comes upon this post and is considering a trip to the Emerson Exchange, to sign up for a Twitter account to gain some familiarity with it.

One thing I really liked was the sessions that used separate tags. One example is the keynote discussion between Guy Kawasaki and Chris Anderson on the power of free. They assigned a tag, #free to this particular session. There are 30+ pages of audience member tweeted notes published during this session, and during the following session, Rebuilding the World with Free Everything. The second session even put the Twitter Search screen running the #free search on the two big screens. The panel addressed some of the questions that came in.

Imagine being in an Emerson Exchange session where you can see your notes and the notes of other audience members streaming in real-time. Or imagine where you could ask your questions and have the presenter see and answer them in real-time. Or imagine where others not attending the event could also see and follow, much like the peek you have into what I saw at SXSW if you followed the links to the #sxsw and #free tags.

Now some presenters might not want any of this and prefer a "no tweeting" rule for their session, but I imagine many would love to see this level of interactivity. I'll raise this issue with the Emerson Exchange Board for their thoughts on this.

The first step to making these imaginations a reality is for you to give Twitter a try, if you haven't already. We offer a few tips on how it works on the DeltaV Twitterers page. Hopefully, you'll give it a try so we can have some of the great, dynamic exchanges just like what I experienced at SXSW!

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Update: I'm reading my RSS feeds over lunch and saw a great post on Twitter from senior digital editor of Chemical Processing magazine, Traci Purdum--Twitter Isn't a Bird-Brained Idea. Glad to see more folks educating others on the value of Twitter!

If you'll pardon some self-indulgence, today marks the final day of my third year of the Emerson Process Experts blog. Time flies when you're having fun! It began with this February 28, 2006 welcome post. The mission of the blog has remained largely the same over the years:

...to create a shorter path between process manufacturing professionals seeking solutions and the experts around Emerson Process Management who have valuable industry, application, and technology expertise. You'll have the opportunity to meet and exchange views with the people behind our services and technologies.

Unlike some prolific members in our trade press who have notched thousands of posts, this will be the 371^st post with 210 comments received to date. Much greater have been the emails and phone calls meeting process automation professionals from many industries and world areas.

In the three years of blogging, a lot has changed. There are more voices in our world of process manufacturing, but not as many as I would have guessed.

One significant change is the continuing expansion of ways to communicate publicly your expertise and ideas. Blogs used to be one the major ways, but now many more ways exist. In these tough, global economic times, bringing more visibility to your expertise is a good thing with the caveat of understanding your company's guidelines, or following well thought out ones, such as IBM's social computing guidelines.

Borrowing from last year's Emerson Exchange presentation, here are a few examples of ways to share your expertise.

If you're not already using LinkedIn, consider joining and building your network. There are groups like the DeltaV Digital Automation System, where you can ask and answer questions if you're experienced working with the DeltaV system. There is also a question and answer section to help find answers faster and share your expertise. The questioner rates the good and best answers, which builds your expertise rating if your answers are selected.

Facebook is another community area, which tends to be used more on a social basis, although there are all sorts of business-related groups. Again, as an example, the DeltaV system has a growing community here.

I continue to be amazed at the new and innovative ways people use these new forms of communications. Emerson's Mike Boudreaux, whom I've featured in several process safety-related posts, has two FriendFeed rooms--one on Process Safety and the other on Safety Instrumented Systems. When he finds news and events related to these topics he adds them to the room. If you have interest in these areas, it's a shortcut for you to find fast information. You can also join the room and add your comments and posts.

And as I mentioned in many earlier posts, Twitter, is increasingly becoming a mainstream form of communication. It's your opportunity to share your expertise 140 characters or less at a time. You decide whom you want to follow and others in turn can choose to follow you. There are an increasing number of voices in our world of process automation. A good place to discover some of these folks is to see who is following our DeltaV Twitter community.

There's much more to say, but I've already overloaded this post with links, so we'll save it for another time.

Thanks to everyone who has discovered the Emerson Process Experts blog and I look forward to more great years.

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Last week I mentioned uploading two of ModelingAndControl.com blog's Greg McMillan's recent presentations. Like I did with his first presentation, here's a short recap of the second one, Control Loop Foundation for Batch and Continuous Control:

What are great about Greg's presentations are the specific application examples. Visit the slides 19-21 to see ways of improving neutralizer control using Feed forward control, signal characterization and proper piping to provide proper spacing for measurement devices. Similarly, slides 22-24 show ways to improve distillation column control using Feed forward control and signal characterization. You mostly don't realize the benefits of improved control until you reduce variability and move the setpoint closer to the operating limit.

Greg is really good at boiling things down. Here are his words summing up basic opportunities in process control (from slides 27 and 28):

• Decrease stick-slip and improve the sensitivity of the final element (Standard Deviation is the product of stick-slip, valve gain, and process gain)
  • Use properly tuned smart positioners, short shafts with tight connections, and low friction packing and seating surfaces to decrease valve slip-stick and dead band (do not use isolation valves for throttling valves)
  • If high friction packing must be used, aggressively tune the smart positioner
  • Improve valve type and sizing and add signal characterization to increase valve sensitivity
  • Use variable speed drives where appropriate for the best sensitivity
• Improve the short and long term reproducibility and reduce the interference and noise in the measurement (Standard Deviation is proportional to reproducibility and noise)
  • Use magnetic and Coriolis mass flow meters to eliminate sensing lines, improve rangeability, and reduce effect of Reynolds Number and piping
  • Use smart transmitters to reduce process and ambient effects
  • Use RTDs and digital transmitters to decrease temperature noise and drift
• Reduce loop dead time (Minimum Integrated Error is proportional to the dead time squared)
  • Decrease valve dead time (stick and dead band)
  • Decrease transport (plug flow volume) and mixing delay (turnover time)
  • Decrease measurement lags (sensor lag, dampening, and filter time)
  • Decrease discrete device delays (scan or update time)
  • Decrease analyzer sample transport and cycle time
• Tune the controllers (Integrated Error is inversely proportional to the controller gain and directly proportional to the controller integral time)
• Add cascade control (Standard Deviation is proportional to the ratio of the period of the secondary to the process time constant of the primary loop)
• Add feed forward control (Standard Deviation is proportional to the root mean square of the measurement, feed forward gain, and timing errors)
• Eliminate or slow down disturbances (track down source and speed)
• Add inline analyzers (probes) and at-line analyzers with automated sampling since ultimately what you want to control is a composition
• Optimize set points (based on process knowledge and variability)
• To realize the benefit of reduced variability, often need to change a set point

He sums up the presentation with these key points:

• Tune the loops
• Use digital positioners and throttle valves to get resolution better than 0.5%
• Use Coriolis and Magmeters to get accuracy better than 0.5% of rate
• Add cascade and feed forward control for disturbances
• Model the process to dispel myths and build on process knowledge
• Improve the set points
• Add composition control
• Reduce the size and speed of disturbances
• Transfer variability from most important process outputs
• Add online data analytics (multivariate statistical process control)
• Add online metrics to spur competition, and to adjust, verify, and justify controls

View or download the presentation if you think some of this guidance might benefit you.

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ModelingAndControl.com blog's Greg McMillan copied me on two presentations he recently gave to a major chemical manufacturer. Being a blogger and firmly believing that great content should be shared with the world, I asked Greg if I could upload the files to my slideshare account. Greg graciously agreed.

Here's one of them, Opportunity Assessment and Advanced Control:

Greg listed the benefits that advanced process control can bring, based on his experience and 33 year career in the chemical manufacturing industry. These included:

• Improved yield (better selectivity)^*
• Less blending, scrap, and rework or higher price for higher grade^*
• Lower utility costs (energy minimization)
• Higher production rate (feed maximization)
• Increased on stream time (fewer shutdowns)
• Reduced maintenance (less stress on equipment)
• Safer operation (fewer shutdowns and less stress on equipment)

^*The benefits for improved yield and less scrap or rework can be taken as an increase in capacity or a reduction in raw materials

The presentation is rich with guidance for opportunity sizing and assessment, common myths and misconceptions, lessons learned, rules of thumb, and of course, Greg's famous top 10 lists. I'll highlight just the opportunity assessment portion of the presentation and leave the rest for your perusal.

Greg showed a chart of three companies who benchmarked their regulatory and batch control, advanced control, and data management. The total improvement in cost of goods sold (COGS) across these three categories was 8%.

Greg advised to begin with a thorough opportunity sizing before the opportunity assessment using cost sheets, product prices, historical trends, business plans, research reports, technical studies, and simulations to establish actual, practical, and theoretical performance--like yields and capacity improvements--with operations and technology.

Next, he counseled to work with the plant process engineers to go through the process, identify constraints, and offer ideas on opportunities to reduce gaps identified in the opportunity sizing exercise to see and work way out of the current process box. You'll want to avoid the temptation of a canned solution or to come to conclusions before the plant personnel thoroughly discuss peculiarities and special problems. Greg felt that it's important for knowledgeable people to speak first and ask questions--and to hold off on solutions. Instead, offer concepts that people can use to generate solutions and be a good listener during this phase.

And from the process itself, use the automation system and the historian to find loops in manual, limit cycles, slow or oscillatory set point and load responses, and controller outputs running near limits.

Your next step is to look for opportunities to infer compositions from fast, lower maintenance measurements such as density, viscosity, mass spectrometers, microwave, and nuclear magnetic resonance. Seek applications of accurate mass flow ratios for material balance knowledge and control.

You'll want to ask the operations folks what would happen if a set point or operating mode were changed. When developing possible solutions, pick control technologies to address opportunities and give relative estimates of implementation cost and time (e.g. high, medium, low) and percent of gap addressed. For a sanity check, ask plant process engineers to estimate percentage of gap addressed by each solution.

Greg's closing thoughts for this assessment process were to take advantage of momentum and group enthusiasm by starting on "quick hits" immediately and setting definitive schedules and assignments for others (to avoid inertia of waiting for a quote or study.) Finally, take the action to tune the loops and improve the loops.

If you view or download the presentation, look at some of the questions you should ask during this assessment on slides 16 and 17. Hopefully you'll find some nuggets on how and where to apply APC to reduce your COGS.

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Marshall Meier received an award for his recent Emerson Exchange presentation, Improve How You Visualize Data. I first met Marshall at last year's Exchange after I discovered we both did presentations on social media, a.k.a. Web 2.0. Here was last year's summary of his presentation.

In this year's data visualization presentation, he shared ideas from preeminent thought leader, Edward Tufte, and his seminal book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Another thought leader Marshall highlighted was Stephen Few, who wrote several books on data presentation, including Show Me the Numbers.

When presenting, your focus should be on just showing the data. Don't clutter it with extraneous visual information. Why does this matter? Your data is important. It helps you and those with whom you share this data better understand problems and make decisions. The goal for an excellent graph or chart should be to get the viewers of this data to ask questions.

Marshall showed the same information presented in both a cluttered and clean presentation. The first view might prompt more thoughts about mad scientists than about the rise and fall of U.S. patents over time. Presentation viewers are more likely to engage in a conversation about the data with the simple uncluttered presentation.

One of Tufte's ideas Marshall shared was the data-to-ink ratio. This is the amount of ink devoted to the data compared to the total ink used in the graphic. For a PowerPoint presentation, think pixels instead of ink. The higher the ratio, the more you're focusing the visual display on the data.

Marshall described "chartjunk" as additional graphics not related to the data in a quest to make the chart more aesthetically pleasing. Instead, it distracts from the data. If you think your graph is boring, you're showing the wrong data. Open a USA Today newspaper and you'll find examples of chartjunk--like a gas price tracker that shows a gas pump graphic with a window containing the average price and another containing the directional price change. Although cute, the data-to-ink ratio is low.

Another example Marshall shared is the comparison between the main Yahoo page and Google page. They are at opposite ends of the visual display spectrum.

For those that love the visually exciting, 3D graphics in Microsoft Office products like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Marshall's simple message is, "Don't use 3D." Although it may look cool, the 3^rd dimension does not add anything. When the graph has multiple data series, 3D makes it difficult to compare data between two data points. In 2D, comparisons are easier to make. Again, the focus shifts from the "eye candy" to the data itself.

You can also fall into the trap of distorting the data. The concept of "lie factor" is the size of the effect shown in the graphic divided by the size the effect in the data itself. Graphic treatments that show a 3D-perspective can visually distort the data. Bar charts often convey size, relative differences, and area better than pie charts do.

Marshall closed his presentation with a famous graph described by Edward Tufte:

Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812.

It shows you can use creativity and "eye-candy" if it amplifies the data and not the extraneous. Congratulations, Marshall, on a very informative, award-winning presentation!

MP3 | iTunes

At the Emerson Exchange last week, Deb Franke and I presented, Feeding that Inner Geek While Sharing Your Expertise and Interests:

The key point of our talk was that there are more ways than ever to discover things that interest you, to share things that interest you, and to use these tools to be more successful (and have more fun) in what you do.

There seemed to be a lot of interest in the topic and it was really great to have the energy of two standing-room-only sessions. We captured the questions and answers from both sessions, in case you weren't able to join us.

The presentation is fully scripted if you download it, or here's a transcript.

One of the really great ideas Deb had was to have index cards made for the question and answers and geek treats that members from both sessions wanted to share.

As with most collaborative things brought to us by social media (a.k.a. Web 2.0), there were some great ideas exchanged and we hope you find some of these geek treats, Q&A and the presentation itself helpful. If this sparks some ideas, keep the conversation flowing and add your comments below.

MP3 | iTunes

At last week's Emerson Exchange, I had the chance to catch one of my favorite presenters, Mike Schmidt, who is a principle SIS consultant in Emerson's refining and chemical industry center. What makes him a favorite is that he can really simplify concepts around process safety and safety instrumented systems (SIS) and make them easy to understand by those of us not steeped in safety. He also adds a touch of humor to keep the audience engaged and having fun while learning about the serious subject of process safety.

Mike co-developed with Emerson process safety engineer, Tim Forbis, the presentation, "What About...Using Bypasses, DBB, and Other Process Features in Safety Instrumented Functions". Their abstract:

There are special design concerns when process features like double-block-and-bleed and isolation-and-bypass valve configurations are included in safety instrumented functions (SIFs). This talk addresses these concerns and also gives guidance on considerations for performing safety integrity level (SIL) verification calculations when incorporating these and other process design features in SIFs.

Mike provided guidance on four process examples including pump and discharge valve, multiple inlets (to a tank or vessel), double block and bleed, and unit bypass and isolation.

Let's take the first example from the presentation of a pump and discharge valve. The safe state is stopping the flow by closing the discharge valve. The complication is the pump continuing to run causing a "deadhead" condition against the valve and risking pump damage. The typical function of the basic process control system (BPCS) is to stop the pump if the discharge valve is not open.

Mike and Tim's recommendation was not to include the pump in the SIF for several reasons including:

• Pump damage is not a hazard protected against
• Pump damage does not warrant SIL-rated protection
• Less complexity means a better spurious trip rate
• Pump stop may not contribute to SIF purpose--stopping flow
• Few components decreases cost--initial investment and operating cost

Now, if deadheading the pump is its own hazard, use a separate SIF with hazard-specific trip conditions. For instance, if the deadhead condition causes the pump to leak leading to fire, then you must mitigate that risk. Or, if the pump stop is included in the SIF as a redundant means to stop flow, then trip on the same condition as the discharge valve. A separate trip condition based on valve action adds complexity and cost, compromises independence and results in worse Probability of Failure on Demand, Average (PFD_AVG) and mean time to failure spurious (MTTF_s).

A final consideration Mike shares is that if your logic solver, such as DeltaV SIS, has sequencing capabilities, the safety logic should stop the pump first and then close the valve.

The other cases also present recommendations and counter-recommendations based on the circumstances of the hazard to be mitigated. Mike's key takeaways for the audience are that the actions for the SIFs may need to be different than the actions for process control in the same process. Also, the final control elements in the SIFs should be limited to those needed to accomplish the purpose of each SIF.

Adding more than is required increases the probability of failure on demand, increases spurious trips, increases investment costs, and increases ongoing operating and maintenance costs.

Update: One of the great suggestions from a customer (thanks Rich!) at last week's Emerson Exchange was that I should consider recording the blog for those with long commutes. I thought we'd give it a whirl, so here is today's post in podcast form. Next step will be to figure out how to get it to iTunes... stay tuned!

There is a flurry of activity as we make final preparations for next week's Emerson Exchange. If you're reading this post before the event (September 29-October 3, 2008), there's a good chance that you're a leading-edge kind of person who knows how to subscribe to this blog via RSS to see this post soon after it's published.

So here are my final tips from a social media (a.k.a. Web 2.0) perspective:

1. Use the handy scheduler to find the sessions you want to attend and to build your personal schedule. There is also a spreadsheet you can download to have the information locally on your PC.
2. If you're not already using some of the Web 2.0 / social media applications and are curious, consider attending Deb Franke and my "Feeding That Inner Geek" presentation (Tues 9/30 9am Chesapeake A, Wed 10/1 2:30pm Chesapeake A). I checked with the hotel and these rooms seat 80 so hopefully they'll be enough room for everyone who wants to catch it.) If you're not going to be able to make it, the presentation will be posted in a future blog post.
3. Give Twitter a try. It's a great way to communicate in short bursts what you're seeing and where to meet up or discover meet ups with others. This is one of the things we'll discuss in our presentation. The big key is to tag your posts with #EmEx so that others can discover them with this #EmEx Twitter search. You can even subscribe to this #EmEx search if you have a web-enabled phone and use the Google Reader mobile version or other mobile RSS reader. Here's a picture showing how this looks on my phone.
4. Many of the people I've featured in blog posts will be presenting. Check out some of the blog categories on the right side for areas of interest. Scan the category posts and see if there will be folks you'd like to see. Look them up in the scheduler or spreadsheet from tip #1.
5. Track me down. All of my contact info on the right side of every blog page and I would really enjoy speaking with you! If you're not going to be joining us in Washington D.C., look for updates on this blog and through the Twitter stream of communications.
6. Have fun! There's lots of old friends to catch up with, new friends to make and great information to exchange. Hopefully, you'll accomplish everything you set out to do and have lots of fun in doing so.

See you in person or virtually through the Web 2.0 /social media channels!

Update: Both sessions are in Chesapeake A!

Here's a quick post to end the week. I had the great honor of doing a keynote presentation at the ISA Marketing & Sales meeting this week on the subject of Web 2.0. The presentation, Challenges, Perils and Opportunities in Web 2.0 for Automation Marketing:

The purpose was to share some thoughts and experiences for other automation suppliers who attended this event. There were a lot of great questions at the end and most seem to be very engaged in the subject. Here a couple of reviews from Walt Boyes, Gary Mintchell, and some great Twitter tweets from Juliann Grant. Also, Carl Henning at PTO Profiblog saw the uploaded presentation and asked if anyone other than our small circle of bloggers really follows any of this stuff. Add any thoughts you might have.

The week after next at the Emerson Exchange, Deb Franke and I will be presenting on the topic of great ways to take advantage of Web 2.0, Feeding that Inner Geek (Tues 9/30 9am Chesapeake B, Wed 10/1 2:30pm Chesapeake A.) The audience is not to sales and marketing folks like this one, but rather engineers and other automation professionals.

I hope if you're going to the Exchange, that you'll join us. Your pre-work, should you choose to accept it, is to read this DeltaV News item on Twitter, take action and join Twitter, and be prepared to tag all your tweets at the Exchange with the tag #EmEx so others can easily find the thoughts you share with this simple search.

Update: Juliann, I saw I fat-fingered your name and left off an "n" on the end. I fixed it. Great seeing you this week!

Update 2: I just saw Gary Mintchell's post pointing to his YouTube Automation Travels video recap from this event. Check it out!

Update 3: Juliann Grant has a great recap, ISA Marketing and Sales Summit Roundup, on her What's Working in Marketing blog. Thanks for your kind words, Juliann!

I'll close this week on a lighter note after the earlier FUD post. I've been working on my keynote presentation for the ISA Marketing & Sales Summit and pushing to have it done today. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the audience is sales and marketing folks with the numerous automation suppliers that serve manufacturers as well as members of the automation trade press. If you come across this post and are in this audience, come join us!

I thought this presentation could follow some of the ideas Deb Franke and I will discuss in our Emerson Exchange presentation, Feeding that Inner Geek. As I thought about it, the focus is very different. Both will discuss the myriad of social media applications dubbed Web 2.0. But the focus for the Emerson Exchange presentation is about the different ways you have to share your interests and expertise.

For the automation sales and marketing community, it's more about how we might consider doing what we do differently.

I think the result of automation professionals sharing their interests and expertise and sales and marketing professionals listening and participating better through many of these Web 2.0 applications will make everyone more effective at what they do. And perhaps have even a little more fun along the way.

Enough procrastinating, I need to get back and finish this presentation. Before I do, one last thing... For those going to the ISA Marketing and Sales Summit, I propose we use a Twitter tag #ISAMSS and for the Emerson Exchange, I propose we use #EmEx. This will help anyone at these two event who use Twitter to follow what others are posting. It's also a great way to share your current location and propose impromptu meetups, like at the hotel lobby bar.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, take the first steps by watching the Twitter in Plain English video and getting a Twitter account. Then connect with me by going to twitter.com/JimCahill and click follow. I'll get notified and follow you in return. If you use these tags during either or both events, you'll be amazed how others will start follow what you have to say.

Update: You can follow the Twitter posts at the Emerson Exchange by using this search: tinyurl.com/TwitterEmEx and/or subscribing to the RSS feed: tinyurl.com/TwitterEmExRSS. If we can get enough folks sharing their thoughts with Twitter and tagging their posts with #EmEx , then even if you're not able to join us, you can get still get perspectives on what's happening.

I just read a great article, How to Achieve Competent Workforce for Safety, in the May edition of Automation World magazine. Written by editor-in-chief, Gary Mintchell (also of Feed Forward blog, Automation Gear blog and Twitter fame), this article looks at the people side of ensuring safety. It examines some of the existing regulations and standards around competency, views from both process and discrete automation suppliers and views from safety-focused organizations.

Emerson's Chuck Miller is quoted in the article and has long articulated the role of people in effective safety programs. The article notes that both the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) and the global IEC organizations, through the IEC 61508 and IEC 61511 standards, "state that people involved with the safety lifecycle must be competent in the area in which they deal."

The safety lifecycle covers a broad spectrum of responsibilities, and Chuck notes, "even people we consider to be safety experts may not be expert in all areas of the lifecycle. For example, a reliability engineer may know a lot about the equipment, but may not be able to competently go into the plant and effectively calibrate and maintain that equipment."

The article describes the top-down support and commitment to build a strong safety culture with competent people across all phases of the safety lifecycle. To help in this competency requirement, Emerson developed a safety management system built according to IEC 61511 and had its processes audited and certified by TÜV in 2006.

A safety management system should clearly define the organization, competency policy, safety audit procedures and the safety lifecycle activities. Good guidelines exist to help. The United Kingdom's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in 2007 published, Managing competence for safety-related system, Part 1: Key Guidance. It includes 16 principles across the plan, design, operate and audit/review phases of the safety lifecycle.

Emerson's safety management system defines clear policies and processes, roles, role competency requirements and the training/experience required to achieve the identified skills for each role. Examples of roles in the project phase are SIS consultants, SIS project leads, SIS software engineering personnel, SIS hardware engineering personnel, and SIS field equipment engineering personnel. In addition to an employee's work experience, a key part of Emerson's safety competency requirements program is the Certified Functional Safety Expert (CFSE) certification. I did a quick search on the list of CFSE/CFSP certified safety professionals and counted more than 60 global Emerson folks that are now certified.

I caught up with Mike Boudreaux to find other ways that Emerson helps end users to address their SIS competency requirements. Thorough knowledge of the entire safety system is important. Competency requirements should apply to all of the components that make up the SIS, from the sensor to the final element and everything in between. Here are some ways that Emerson is helping:

• SIS Seminars that include a safety overview, discussion of SIS applications and a discussion of the safety lifecycle
• PlantWeb University SIS courses that are free online courses that provide a good overview of IEC 61508/61511 safety lifecycle concepts.
• Process Safety Training Courses that cover the Analysis and Realization phases of the IEC 61511 safety lifecycle
• Training courses on the SIS components that Emerson supplies, including the sensors, logic solvers, final elements, and safety lifecycle tools.
• Emerson has supported the development of the CSFE/CSFP programs through participation on the CFSE Governance Board. The governance board is an independent board that administers certification tests for CFSE.

Mike also points out, "competency goes beyond knowledge of the concepts and technologies that are used to implement an SIS. Good design and implementation reduces the random and common cause hardware failures. It is in preventing the systematic failures where managing competency throughout the entire safety lifecycle becomes so important. For many end users, this means that developing competency management in the Operation phase is very critical."

Knowledge of the process application and the hazards involved is a must. IEC 61511 also calls out the need for "adequate management and leadership skills appropriate to their role in the safety lifecycle activities" as part of competency. This has a lot to do with the type of people that you employ and the company culture that you develop. It is not something that can be created overnight and it takes a long-term commitment to be successful.

Update: Welcome Feed Forward blog readers!

I won't spoil the press release in the works about the donation of a DeltaV system to a major university for use by a consortium of universities, but I will share that Emerson's Terry Blevins was at the university last week. He was there to provide an introductory process control and DeltaV system overview.

Since a consortium of universities is involved, a neat things done for this installation was to setup VPN access and Windows Remote Desktop access into the system to configure, test, and run the DeltaV control logic and calculations created using MatLab. In preparation for teaching the course, Terry used VPN to connect to the university's intranet. He then opened a remote desktop connection into the DeltaV system to prepare the models and simulations he was going to use to teach the course. The other universities' graduate students will use this same method as they collaboratively advance their research.

I thought I share some of these basics in case you are a college student or new to our world of process automation. Fair warning--for those experienced automation professionals, quickly hit the "back" button to avoid going any further into this post.

Terry begins his introductory presentation with organization and layout of a process manufacturing plant with the caveat that there is no "typical". Plants are divided into process areas and these areas are defined based on the equipment or process grouping. Examples are tank farms, boiler houses etc.

Terry gave a field device and wiring overview, showing examples of two-wire, four-wire, HART and Foundation fieldbus devices and how they connect into an automation system's I/O.

Next, he covered documentation of the plant control and instrumentation. Typical documentation includes a plot plan, which is a physical layout of the plant. Process flow diagrams show the major pieces of equipment in a process area and their design operating conditions. A P&ID (Process & Instrumentation Diagram) shows the piping and instrumentation installed. Loop sheets show the details of instrumentation and field wiring. Terry referenced the ISA S5.1 tag number convention standard that helps identify I/O as pressure, flow, temperature etc. and its readout and output function.

Terry showed the change in technology in distributed control systems over time from a hardware and field wiring perspective from individual wiring per device, to bus-based I/O. To familiarize the students with the hardware they might see in plants, he showed pictures of controller and I/O cabinets, marshalling panels, junction boxes, and panels with connections to other intelligent devices.

He then got specific with the hardware components and software applications in the DeltaV system and showed how the students could set up virtual plants with simulations of a running process against their control strategies.

After I passed a draft Terry's way for review, he pointed me to one of his earlier ModelingAndControl.com posts, Control Basics and Terminology that covered these basics plus more including:

• Introduction Historic Perspective
• Field Devices and Wiring
• Documentation of Plant Control and Instrumentation
• Characterizing the Process, Terminology
• Control System Objectives
• Manual and Feedback Control
• Feedforward Control
• Cascade Control
• Override Control
• Split Range Valve Position and Ratio Control

He even posted a test for those of you really ambitious new learners out there. If you're new to the world of process control, take a look at these links when you have some bandwidth and see if you find them valuable.

Update: A colleague from our DeltaV Twitter community points out that my hyperlink to Characterizing the Process, Terminology was not linked correctly. I've now updated it. Thanks for keeping me on my toes!

Update 2: Another reader found my incorrect use of "are" instead of "is" in the second paragraph. Specifically:

Consortium is a collective noun and therefore singular, not plural. The same applies to nouns such as group, herd and flock. The predicate (are/is) relates back to the singular subject (consortium), not to the plural object (universities).

As regular readers can attest, I need all the help I can get when it comes to grammar!

When I posted last week on WirelessHART reliability, I had a chance to speak to Emerson's Russ Muller who is a senior PlantWeb specialist. As we discussed the reliability figures, Russ mentioned that the sites that applied the best practices saw reliability figures much higher than 99%. If you've seen the PlantWeb University Wireless course, in the Wireless 203- Self Organizing Networks section, it shows this figure:

Even in this extreme example of low reliability links, by designing multiple paths for each device, a self-organizing network can reach that level of performance by constantly choosing the path that offers the best reliability at the time. With self-organizing networks, it's important to note that site surveys are not required. Russ shared with me some best practices learned from the early wireless installations which I'll pass along to you.

The first consideration is the size of your facility. If you have a large facility like a refinery or chemical plant, the wireless field network should be scoped to a single process unit. For vertically arranged facilities like power plants or some pharmaceutical sites, the self-organizing network should be scoped to a single floor.

Next, it is extremely helpful to have a scaled drawing of the single process unit or floor where the network will be installed. In an earlier post, I discussed the creative use of Google Earth to zoom in on an outdoor facility where they didn't have scaled drawings handy. These building drawings are typically available for inside facilities, which is a good thing since the satellite photos can't see inside a building... yet!

With the scaled drawing, plot the location of wireless devices. Consider the immediate ones you want to install as well as possible future ones. Every wireless device should have multiple neighbors to provide path redundancy for higher overall communications reliability. Based on the experience gathered from hundreds of installations to date, each wireless self-organizing network should be designed with a minimum of five wireless devices to provide this path diversity.

As you look at the devices plotted on your scaled drawing, it's ideal that each device have three neighbors as potential paths of communication.

Next, consider the placement of the wireless gateway. In small networks, the smart wireless gateway should be located in the center of the network. For larger networks or installations that require the wireless gateway mounted in a control or rack room, you should build the self-organizing network around the location of the wireless gateway, closest ones first, per your plot plan. Also, remember that the gateway needs to connect the network to your host automation or asset management system using common industry communications standards like OPC, MODBUS and MODBUS TCP.

The wireless gateway should have a direct wireless connection (connected without a hop through another device) to 25% of the devices in the self-organizing network. It will still be reliable if less than 25%, but greater than 25% is optimal. You can add wireless devices or repeaters to help achieve this best practice.

During installation, add devices outward from the gateway to reach other areas in the process unit. This installation process helps you see the devices as they are being added and helps verify the robustness of the communications.

I hope sharing these best practices in addition to the PlantWeb University Wireless courses provides you the background to try a wireless field network application in your facility.

I have the honor and privilege of presenting a keynote at the 2008 ISA Marketing & Sales Summit in September in Cleveland, Ohio. My presentation will be around social media, also known as Web 2.0.

Now, unless you are a sales- or marketing-person with one of the automation suppliers or with an agency who serves them, this probably isn't a conference for you. If you are, by all means, come! The summit is about sharing marketing practices to help us do a better job of providing automation professionals with the products, services and information they need to better do their jobs.

I know that like lawyers, marketers have been on the receiving end of pointed humor, like this classic Dilbert cartoon (I was hoping I could embed the cartoon in this post but their non-commercial use terms don't seem to allow this... which reminds me of another Dilbert classic.)

Pointed-humor aside and in the spirit of listening and improvement, what would you have me convey to those attending the Marketing & Sales summit:

What are we doing that we should stop doing?

What are we not doing that we should be doing?

What else?

A clear change from traditional marketing to the world of social media is the shift from monolog to dialog. In this spirit, I invite your thoughts as comments to this post.

If you prefer to keep these thoughts confidential, send me an email, call me (+1 512.992.7641), Skype me or send me a Twitter direct message. I know there are even more social media ways to connect on this topic, but one of these should work.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

One way to reduce the sheer volume of email from those you work with is to promise to blog them. Most take this as an idle threat, so unfortunately the emails keep flowing. Here's a case where the threat is not idle, and here's the post to prove it.

The original question came in from a process manufacturer to ModelingAndControl.com's Greg McMillan and asked him for a recommended pH probe for low pH material (1-3pH). My hopefully trusty source, the pH entry in Wikipedia, puts that on a scale with gastric acid.

Greg contacted Dave Joseph, a senior industry manager in Emerson's Rosemount Analytical Liquid business. Dave responded:

In my experience, measuring low pH values in the 1-3 range is not very difficult. Although there is a nonlinear effect called "acid error", the primary source of error is junction potential due to the high concentration of H+. This manifests as a pH reading that ramps quickly into the ballpark but may take quite some time (100 secs or more) to get to the final value. It would be common for the reading to drop from 6 to 2.4 and then tick slowly down to 2.0, for instance. A good sensor for that kind of behavior is a more open junction like our PERpH-X design that allows the potential to stabilize quickly. It would also help cut the time necessary for calibration.

A clean ISFET [Ion-sensitive field effect transistor] sensor responds quickly regardless of the temperature, so the FET is an improvement for very low temperature processes (near 0°C) where high glass impedance causes slow response and noisy readings. In practice, most pH measurement issues have to do with the reference side of the sensor, which is subject to coating, plugging, poisoning, and junction potentials. pH applications can involve many different processes and conditions. Practically all of the troublesome measurements (high temperature, caustic (high pH), steam cleaning) for glass electrodes are even more problematic for ISFETs. In a low pH stream with no other concerns, an ISFET would be expected to function as well as a glass electrode, but with no specific advantages.

Greg's follow up question was:

Are there any hydration requirements for an ISFET? My understanding is that a glass electrode depends upon a hydrated gel layer.

Dave responded:

The glass electrode does use a hydrated gel layer to produce a stable potential. An ISFET works more directly and does not need hydration to make the measurement. That means that an ISFET may recover from a dry environment faster than a glass electrode would. However, both types of electrodes require a reference with a silver/silver chloride solution of water, and the presence of water in the process is required for acceptable continuous measurement.

I thought there was some wisdom in the exchange that needed to be set free from the clutches of my email inbox. Then again, let's see if Greg or Dave ever includes me on another email!

This one was too good not to highlight. For those not familiar with the look of DeltaV controller and I/O subsystem, here's what it looks like when it's a chocolate cake:

Emerson's DeltaV team is honored to be a part of Professor Atanas Serbezov and his Advanced Process Control class at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology's Department of Chemical Engineering in celebration of completion of another successful semester.

For all the engineering students in all the great educational institutions across the globe, process manufacturers and automation suppliers look forward to those of you who choose to join our ranks!

Update: I received a note with yet another example of Rose-Hulman cake mastery, this time with the DeltaV character, Duncan. Very nice!

I mentioned submittal of two social media-based abstracts to the Emerson Exchange in an earlier post. Each year, the Emerson Exchange board members receive way more submittals than they can accept, so anyone who wants to present has to keep their fingers crossed.

The good news is that one of the two was accepted. Deb Franke and I will be presenting:

Feeding that Inner Geek

Join Deb Franke and Jim Cahill in a conversation on using the internet, high-tech gadgets, and social media technologies that will enable you to be more productive and effective in all that you do, especially in your working career.

We picked this title because it was the title one of the most visited blog posts on this site to date. And with the Emerson Exchange's hundreds of sessions to choose from, we wanted a title that might stand out.

The goal is to build on presentation we did last year, Getting the Most Value from the Internet: How New Web 2.0 Tools and Techniques Can Help You Innovate.

Social media tools continue to proliferate as people learn the value they can bring. Two examples that we did not discuss last year are Twitter and Friendfeed. Friendfeed is new and Twitter is rapidly growing. I have been looking into the utility of Twitter for people with interest in the DeltaV system, to connect and communicate directly with one another. As learning occurs along the way, I'm sharing tips with our nascent DeltaV Twitter community.

The common thread with these social media applications is that they connect people with other people who have similar interests. Our hope is that one of these interests is around our world of process automation.

One final note, we have the honor of being one of the blogs mentioned in the new book, Groundswell. Written by Forrester Research principal analysts, Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, it helps you and your business clearly formulate your strategy with respect to social media. I just finished the book the other night, and in the spirit of the groundswell, put my review of it on Amazon.com. Hint... I liked it.

Over the past several weeks, ModelingAndControl.com's Greg McMillan has shared a three-part series on common control myths with his readers. In the initial post in the series, Common Control Myths - Part 1, Greg offers five myths, which he then shoots down, one by one.

Three of his five involve disturbances in the process. On unmeasured disturbances, Greg offers the following myth and rebuttal:

Unmeasured disturbances are a side issue - if there were no unmeasured disturbances, control would be a non issue because you could home in on the controller output that corresponds to the desired set point for a process variable. You would just need to run some data fitting algorithm one time and the loop would be set for the life of the process. In reality, there are always unmeasured disturbances.

Often the best-laid designs on newly commissioned loops require adjustments over time as the control engineer learns about the unmeasured disturbances impacting the loop.

In the second post in the series, Greg gets deep into the equations to show the scan time effects on peak and integrated errors. Since I've forgotten more than I've remembered, I'll trust him that the math checks out... J

In the final post of the trilogy, Greg debunks control myths six through ten. These include control valve performance, pH sensors, and thermocouples versus RTDs. For example, on pH sensors, he writes:

The most accurate type of pH sensors are used most often - the most popular sensors are the ones that require the least amount of maintenance, such as references with solid electrolytes, even though these may require more time to equilibrate and have a more variable junction potential. The flowing liquid junction reference for the right materials of construction and electrolyte is generally the most accurate but the least used type of pH electrode in industry because of the need to pressurize and refill the reservoir.

If you're early in your career as an automation engineer, you definitely want to subscribe to the ModelingAndControl.com RSS feed as one of your shortcuts to rapid learning.

Update: I was a bit too hasty calling it a trilogy! Greg has unleashed Part 4 of his common control myths.

The Automation List on Control.com recently had a question about IMC Tuning for Integrated Processes. I googled around for IMC or internal model control for a good definition and found these 2002 Introduction to Robust Control lecture notes:

The Internal Model Control (IMC) philosophy relies on the Internal Model Principle, which states that control can be achieved only if the control system encapsulates, either implicitly or explicitly, some representation of the process to be controlled.

The Automation List question asked how IMC can be implemented if the process time constant, process gain, control integral and controller gain are unknown. This person did a manual step test on the drum level feedwater control valve and the drum level starts to integrate (rise.) Measuring this occurrence provides dead time, level rate of change and change in control valve position.

The questioner writes:

I know you can implement Lambda Tuning, but from what I've seen with this, you end up with a very sluggish system that responds quite poorly due to the low value of Kc (please don't comment here on 3 element control, as this is not apart of the discussion).

Am I missing something here, or have other people used different methods?

We've had several posts in the past on Lambda tuning, so I forwarded this question to Mark Coughran, a senior control engineering consultant on the Advanced Applied Technology team.

Mark notes:

Whatever method you use, it is important to understand each of the terms in the equations and the appropriate units of measure. Training is available to make clear how to measure the process dynamics, choose Lambda, and calculate the controller gain and reset. Emerson Educational Services offers the courses Process Dynamics, Control and Tuning Fundamentals (9030) and Modern Loop Tuning (9032). Tools and on-site services are also available.

Lambda tuning simply means the loop will not oscillate and you choose the speed of closed-loop response (Lambda), within some reasonable constraints. There is no reason to believe that Lambda tuning is arbitrarily "slow" or "fast", since you choose the Lambda.

ZN or Ziegler-Nichols is a method to deliberately make the loop oscillate. This is not a good idea in any process plant.

Let's end this week highlighting a new book by ModelingAndControl.com's Greg McMillan. The book, The Funnier Side of Retirement for Engineers and People of the Technical Persuasion, is a very funny look at those entering their golden, post-work years.

When I saw this news on my DeltaV News RSS feed, I rushed up to Greg's office to see if I could get my hands on one of the books, which I did (score!) I'm a big fan of Greg's top ten lists, his marriage of humor and our technical world of process control and of course the illustrations by Ted Williams.

As Greg mentions in his post about the book, Now for Something Completely Different:

About every year since 1985, I wrote a book whether I needed to or not. Some of the books were written to entertain myself and hopefully others by adding a humorous view point to what is normally a very a serious profession.

Imagine writing a book a year for over 20 straight years... wow! And I think a few blog posts a week are tough...

For his older books where Greg has received back the copyrights, he's generously offered these free to the world on the Modeling and Control blog. You can get a sample of this humor and fun illustrations in the eBook, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Control Room.

My guess is that you'll enjoy this book whether you're approaching these golden years yourself or even if not.

Before the holidays, ModelingAndControl.com's Greg McMillan had another set of eBooks, Centrifugal and Axial Compressor Control Student Text and Instructor's Guide. These books were originally published in 1983 and the copyrights were returned to Greg.

As described in the "About the Book" section, the text is geared for instrumentation and process control design engineers. The text describes:

...the surge phenomena and illustrates the effect of the operating conditions on surge. Covers various methods of throughput and surge feedback control. It explains the need for preprogrammed open-loop surge control and describes newly developed methods for implementation and coordination with feedback control.

Greg was recently asked by a colleague how surge control might be applied in automation systems like the DeltaV system. He responded:

DeltaV provides an excellent solution for nearly any control system that prevents surge by the manipulation of a control valve if you make the execution time of the module 0.1 to 0.2 seconds so that it is much faster than valve. Surge control valves have a response time of 1 to 5 seconds. Also, you should configure an open loop back in the DeltaV module because once a compressor gets into surge a feedback PI loop can't get it out of surge no matter how fast it is due to the flow reversals every couple of seconds. The open loop back up is simply a CALC block in DeltaV that puts the PI in ROUT and increments the surge valve position when activated. When deactivated it returns the PI to its preferred mode. The trigger for activation is a crossing of a line between the actual surge curve and the surge controller set point allowing for some error in the knowledge of the surge curve. The clear point for deactivation is a point well to the right of the surge controller set point for at least a couple of seconds.

This set of eBooks joins his other freely available eBooks:

• A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Control Room
• Biochemical Measurement and Control
• Continuous Control Techniques for Distributed Control Systems

If your process includes centrifugal or axial compressors, you may want to take a look these latest additions to the eBook library.

Engineers being the problem solvers that they are, typically enjoy a project in full execution mode. Problems must be quickly confronted and solved to keep everything moving forward. As we've mentioned in earlier posts, the part they typically like least is the upfront justification to get the projects approved in the first place.

Emerson's Pete Sharpe, a principal consultant in the Advanced Automation Services organization, shared his thoughts on automation investment justification with the readers of Automation World magazine. The article, Strengthen Company, Minimize Risk, pointed to areas of opportunity for project justification.

Pete's guidance is to look at the economic buckets your efforts in automation can influence, which boils down to increasing profits and minimizing risk. Simply put:

To increase profits, "you must either increase revenues or lower costs," he emphasizes. Revenue is a bucket on the positive side of the formula that is affected by things like throughput, yields, recoveries or product price. That means "you have to shift production toward the more valuable products, or increase yield, reduce off-spec, product losses and downgrades of product," Sharpe states. Cost-lowering considerations could involve maintenance, labor, energy, utilities or raw materials, among other areas.

Pete cites an example of looking at quality. Poor quality can lead to customer rejection, off spec and rework. Providing better quality than is specified in the contract is called "quality giveaway". It likely means additional costs are being incurred without receiving additional price for this quality. This is particularly relevant to commodity markets such as gasoline and diesel. Other potential sources of justification are in intangible costs like safety and environmental compliance.

Minimizing risk is about reducing the probability that something bad will occur in the plant's operation. These projects focus on improving reliability, safety, environmental liability, and dealing with abnormal situations. Risk can be evaluated based on the frequency and severity of historical incidents. Then appropriate application of technology and programs designed to mitigate the highest risk areas by applying such things as predictive maintenance, operator training systems or abnormal situation prevention technologies.

The key is to look for how your project will affect the throughput, production costs and total production value on an on-going basis. Ultimately, the expected financial return of the project will determine whether the project goes forward or not. The article sums this up:

...the ultimate metric for justifying investments is ROI. He notes that it includes the time value of money, and calculation of returns based on expected future cash flows from the investment.

In most companies, the management team evaluates potential projects based on the expected return and the risk associated with the investment. The projects with the highest rate of return and lowest perceived risk are those that will likely be funded. In almost all cases, the project return must exceed the manufacturer's cost of capital, which varies depending on company. Pete notes that there are exceptions where a low return, discretionary project is approved. This could be a "stay-in-business" investment decision, which ultimately is about reducing overall business risk.

Emerson technologist and ModelingAndControl.com blogger, Greg McMillan, coauthors with Solutia's Mark Sowell an article, Virtual Control of Real PH in the November issue of Control magazine. The wonderful thing about Greg's writing is that it seems to always include experienced-based rules of thumb, a lack of sugarcoating the facts, and large amounts of humor.

In this article, the authors waste no time in mentioning why we should be interested in reading the article. Most plants have pH control applications, even if in their waste-treatment areas. These areas usually have environmental compliance issues and for applications like crystallizers, fermenters, reactors, and strippers, pH control is critical.

My example of Greg not sugarcoating the facts is:

While we tend to focus on the configuration of the DCS, achieving the full potential of the pH measurement requires exceptional attention to every aspect of the system design. Deficiencies in the equipment, piping, valves or sensor selection or installation can cause the system to fail miserably.

This advice alone may save someone loads of troubleshooting time by first looking at the field equipment and installation before fiddling with the automation system's configuration and tuning.

He's also very good at simplifying the approach to pH control problem solving by helping the reader form a quick mental picture:

The name of the game with pH is to minimize the loop dead time to minimize the excursion along the highly nonlinear titration curve.

The solution described in the article is to use a virtual plant--a dynamic simulation of the waste-treatment system--based on a first-principle dynamic model of the pH system and control system configuration. These all run in the same PC. Dynamic simulations can be quite complex but here's where Greg's rules of thumb based on his experience come in. The key is to focus on simplification and attention to the details that really matter. An example of a rule of thumb:

For pH modeling for process control of environmental systems, about 20 acids and bases cover about 90% of the applications. The physical properties requirements are much less (just molecular weight, density and dissociation constants of each acid and base). The waste treatment systems are normally dilute enough so that activity coefficients are not needed.

They used the virtual plant to see if the existing fuzzy logic control could be replaced with a straightforward model predictive control (MPC) strategy. You'll have to read the article to see the full approach but the bottom line was that:

The MPC did a much better than expected job of chasing the acid concentration... We confirmed later that the production unit that was the source of most of the strong acid was having issues. A comparison of the virtual plant and actual plant control valve positions and pH response revealed there was no flow going through one of the second-stage reagent valves. The problem cleared a day after a phone call.

I had to wrap up this post with an example of Greg's ever-present humor that engineers can appreciate:

It takes more and more interesting opportunities to get weathered engineers excited. However, the almost limitless opportunities to explore advanced control ideas make us downright tingly.

If you've been fighting pH control, the article is well worth it as is the "Extra-Credit Reading" they cite.

As he announces yet another eBook now available, ModelingAndControl.com's Greg McMillan continues to share his control expertise with the world.

Greg describes the book Biochemical Measurement and Control:

When Monsanto was making the transition to a life science company, I had the opportunity to work on fermenter measurement and control for various genetically engineered products. Important opportunities identified then such as the application of mass spectrometers, dissolved carbon dioxide probes, and inferential measurements of metabolic processes have come to fruition today opening the door to more advanced process analysis and control techniques. Additionally the applications gave me a chance to apply my expertise in pH measurement and control in new ways and dig into the practical aspects of dissolved oxygen measurement and control.

As he goes on to mention, the progression of technology and new thinking prompted an updated version, New Directions in Bioprocess Modeling and Control: Maximizing Process Analytical Technology Benefits published by ISA in 2006. This book:

...provides an updated view and details on new tools for batch modeling, analysis, and control. This ISA book includes the development of neural network inferential measurements of dryer moisture by Washington University in Saint Louis and my first principle dynamic fermentor models for the National Corn to Ethanol Research Center. The book concludes with an excellent review of new technology for batch analytics by the University of Texas.

As I had mentioned in an earlier post, Greg has chosen to make many of his works available as free eBooks once the copyrights are returned to him. So, for the next many years, the Bioprocess book is available for purchase from the ISA folks or in the DeltaV Bookstore, along with many other great books we've discovered along the way.

We live in great times where many with expertise make it freely available. If this expertise happens to intersect with our interests and we have some bandwidth to absorb it, we're but a mere Google search (or whatever your favorite search engine happens to be) away. It just wasn't this easy way back when!

If you're an automation professional and not already subscribed to the ModelingAndControl.com blog, you're missing some great stuff.

Greg McMillan has recently posted three "sensible sensor installation" posts:

• Sensible Sensor Installation
• Sensible Sensor Installation - Follow Up
• Sensible Sensor Installation - Tips

Greg offers his rules of thumb based on his vast plant experience for installing temperature and pH sensors. Here's an example from his initial post:

The best sensitivity from a temperature or pH sensor can generally be achieved by an installation where the tip of the thermowell or electrode is in the center of the pipeline. This is particularly important when there is a high viscosity fluid such as a polymer for temperature control or concentrated sulfuric acid reagent for pH control. For temperature, it is also desirable to maximize the insertion length in the center line to reduce the thermal conduction error from the tip to the flange. The insertion of the thermowell into an elbow affords this opportunity.

I know when I was a young systems engineer I would have really appreciated more rules of thumb to give me grounding on some of the things I needed to consider. Experience teaches these things, so any shortcuts to gain these experiences are greatly appreciated.

As I mentioned in a Web 2.0 presentation at the last Emerson Exchange, many ways are emerging to share your process automation expertise. A blog is one way, but other ways include adding/modifying entries in Wikipedia, social bookmarking with Del.icio.us, and sharing interesting posts you come across with web-based RSS readers like Google Reader.

If you've not yet taken the plunge to see what subscribing to RSS feeds is all about, see the screencast of how to subscribe to this blog, and how to import my blogroll. This is my way of helping get you jumpstarted to these rules of thumb with many automation and process industry-based blogs, including Terry and Greg's ModelingAndControl.com.

John Dolenc, a principal consulting engineer in Emerson's advanced applied technology organization whom you may recall from earlier posts, presented Estimating Benefits from Process Automation at the Emerson Exchange.

John began by discussing what types of activities are performed during a process automation modernization feasibility study. Project justification is one of the most difficult steps to complete.

Start with looking at the plant as a financial asset. Perform a financial balance across a process unit in the same manner as performing a material and energy balance. Capital enters a process unit in the raw materials, net utilities, operating expenses, and maintenance expenses. Value is added within the process unit. Capital flows out in primary and secondary products as well as the waste streams. After identifying the financial streams, identify areas that need improvement and determine whether better process automation can help.

Capital projects are justified by either increasing the revenue of the plant or by reducing the costs to manufacture the products. Revenue may be increased through increasing production capacity (if additional product can be sold), and increasing the yield of more profitable products while reducing lower grade product and waste streams. Look for capacity increases through being able to run closer to constraints by reduced process variability. Can you reduce unproductive time such as grade changeovers, off-spec blending and downtime for cleaning through better process control? Can you reduce cycle time for batch processes by better control of reaction conditions and eliminating wait time for operator actions?

Another method of increasing plant profitability is by working with the marketing and sales force to understand what your customers' value about your product. Can price be slightly increased if the product consistently meets specification and delivery schedules and emergency production is provided when needed?

Reducing costs are a big area of value creation. Some areas to look for cost reduction opportunities include increasing feedstock yield, reducing energy consumption, better use of direct and indirect labor, and limiting off-spec material, abnormal events, demurrage and maintenance.

These are the opportunities for automation project financial justification. So what are some benefit estimation methods you can employ? John mentioned the best operator method, data reduction method, and percent limit violation as three methods of estimation. The best operator method considers historically identifying key performance indicators at their optimum point. What are the "best operators" doing to make this happen? The key is to look for how to automate these best practices. Your project justification is the difference between operating at the "best operator" condition versus the historical average condition.

John went through an example of looking at batch cycle times, throwing out outliers caused by extenuating circumstances, and digging into the process automation that can be done to move from the average cycle time to the best cycle time.

He discussed the other methods, data reduction method and limit violation methods. With the latter, conceptually the results of the automation project are to reduce overall variability. This means you can run closer to your process or specification limit. This means operating set points can be set closer to these limits, thus reducing costs such as product giveaways and excess energy usage. The presentation includes some of the statistical methods to build your financial justification. John offered a rule of thumb that you would reduce standard deviation by at least 50% by improving overall control performance.

John summarized his presentation with these key points:

• Justification is difficult, but necessary to receive approval for automation projects
• Historical data collection is vital
• Build a base case
• Some "prediction" of results is necessary

I really enjoy getting the chance to present to at the Emerson Exchange. This year, I teamed up with Emerson e-Marketing manager, Deb Franke, to discuss the emergence of Web 2.0 applications and technologies. Deb and I have teamed on many initiatives over the years, including nagivating the path to make the Emerson Process Experts blog a reality.

Our presentation was entitled, Getting the Most Value from the Internet: How New Web 2.0 Tools and Techniques Can Help You Innovate. We have embedded voiceover notes in the presentation and separately in a presentation transcript.

Both sessions of the presentation were very well attended, even surprisingly, the 8 am Thursday morning session. These late-week, early morning sessions can get dicey given the catching up process with friends and acquaintances which have been known (I'm told) to carry on into the wee hours.

The premise of our discussion is that the web has been changing from a one-way monolog (Web 1.0) to dialogs or many-to-many conversations (Web 2.0). We explored two paths, information consumption and information production. From an information consumer standpoint, Deb discussed ways to be more efficient in finding the information you need to be more effective and innovative. The presentation includes short screencasts (no audio) showing how to subscribe to RSS feeds using Google Reader and how to get a jump-start in subscribing to all the automation feeds on my blogroll on the right side area of this page.

I discuss the information production path, discussing ways to un-trap the wisdom that is often locked in our email inboxes and sent items folders. One of the applications described is Del.icio.us, which also has a screencast demo.

In the spirit of contributing to those who could not attend, we've captured everything we discussed as well as the questions and answers from both sessions. These are available on an Emerson Exchange Resources page on this blog. We also include participation tips if you're ready to share your expertise with the world. If you have questions after seeing the presentation and other materials, join the conversation and add a comment.

For those planning to attend next year's event in Washington D.C., keep me posted on your Web 2.0 experiences, and perhaps we can jointly present.

As reported in the DeltaV News RSS feed recently, Automation World magazine's C. Kenna Amos wrote an article, Getting Projects Approved. I know from my days as a systems engineer, that financially justifying a capital project was not nearly as fun as executing the project. Most engineers enjoy the action of seeing their work come to life more than convincing others to approve the capital to get the project going. They also are not typically versed in the language of financial analysis.

The article captures the wisdom of Emerson's Doug White, a vice president of advanced automation services. Doug and his team often assist process manufacturers in ways to help quantify return on investment for automation and advanced automation projects.

In the article, Doug notes:

The project has to be very attractive to be funded, because it will compete with others. The project has to show a clear and compelling return on investment.

Easy enough, but the trick is how to do this. Doug recommends that engineers work with the financial group to understand their selection criteria for capital projects. Basics for most projects include cash outflow analysis and when the return on investment begins. This is the basis for the payback calculations. Also, the capital proposal should include key non-quantifiable benefits often found in health, safety, and environmental (HSE) considerations.

The closer you can tie your proposal to key organizational initiatives, the more the proposal will be noticed more than others will. When it comes to presenting your proposal:

Begin by first defining the problem, then telling them why your project is important and giving reasons why it needs to be done, he emphasizes. Then--and only then--go into financials, beginning with the most likely scenario.

Doug has captured much of his experience in a whitepaper, Calculating ROI for Automation Projects. It comprehensively goes through the components of return on invested capital and how to calculate each component. Give this whitepaper a thorough review and you will be better prepared to have that conversation with the financial group.

For those of you going to the Emerson Exchange next week in Dallas, make sure to catch Doug's short course, How To Find The Economics For Process Automation Investments that will be held Tuesday at 2:15pm and repeated Wednesday at 8am. Here's the abstract for this presentation:

This session presents realistic approaches to automation project economic analysis and justification. The viewpoint is that of the business financial analyst. Specific areas where automation affects the business results are identified and quantified.

Prolific author (examples here, here, and here to name a few) and ModelingAndControl.com blogger, Greg McMillan, continues to share his process control wisdom and expertise with the world.

This week he announced another freely available ebook, Continuous Control Techniques for Distributed Control Systems. This is the second in a series of books where the copyright has been returned to Greg after a time being held by the publisher.

Instead of burying these works in a box somewhere, Greg has chosen to make these freely available to help our current and future generations of automation and control engineers learn the craft as they search the internet and come upon these on-line works.

As he mentions in his post, this book follows in the footsteps of the first eBook, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Control Room. He also mentions another eBook is planned, Biochemical Measurement and Control.

If you are a control engineer or student of this profession you should be subscribed to the ModelingAndControl.com RSS feed to learn from one the members of the process automation hall of fame!

In an earlier post, I had mentioned that my colleague Deb Franke and I will be presenting at the Emerson Exchange (September 10-14, Dallas TX.) The topic is how new Web 2.0 tools and techniques can help you innovate (presented twice--Wednesday 3pm / Thursday 8am.)

There must be something to this topic, because I discovered that we're not alone. Emerson's Marshall Meier, a project manager for Foundation fieldbus projects involving Rosemount FF transmitters, is presenting the topic, Web 2.0 in the plant. You can bet I'll be at one of his two sessions (Tuesday 10am / Wednesday 8am.)

Marshall indicated the goal of his presentation is to introduce the audience to various Web 2.0 technologies, and give them some ideas on how those technologies could be used in a plant. Here's his submitted abstract:

In 2006, Time Magazine said YOU were the Person of the Year. "You" being one of the millions, maybe billions, of people in the world who are building Web 2.0. The web is no longer read-only medium, rather an interactive environment where the users both generate and consume the content. This workshop will introduce you to some of the most interesting Web 2.0 technologies out there.

Marshall plans to cover the definition of Web 2.0, various examples like RSS, social bookmarking, wikis, video sharing, maps, and photo sharing. These will include possible applications in plants. He'll be looking to have a very interactive session to explore other potential uses for these people-connecting technologies.

Marshall also shared that like me, he's a huge fan of RSS for its ability to bring information to him based on his interests.

An RSS search feed pointed to a Process and Control Today news item about the opening on a new Emerson European flow center. This center provides comparison, selection, final assembly, configuration, calibration, testing, support and training for quite a range of Emerson Process management flow brands including Micro Motion, Rosemount, and Brooks Instrument. The flow technologies include Coriolis, magnetic flow, vortex, thermal mass flow, and variable area meters.

The center was built to help process manufacturers primarily in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. With so many technologies, each have their advantages in different applications, it was important to have a common area where manufacturers could work with product and application experts to properly select and configure the best solution for the application.

I caught up with Emerson's Henk Verweerd who shared some highlights with me. The center, located between Arnhem and Utrecht in the Netherlands, supports seven languages, employs 275 people, and covers over 9000 square meters of floor space. In addition to the technical and application support, the team performs project and order management, repair management, and creation of documentation for projects and required regulatory agencies.

With the trend toward project modularization to decrease project schedules, the team helps instrument integrated systems for railcar, ship and truck loading/unloading, pipeline/LPG/LNG/gas metering, and proving Coriolis meters. The flow center includes four mini-plants fully instrumented with Foundation fieldbus devices to provide hand-on training for flow meters and applications, including the diagnostics these devices can provide to the automation systems.

Henk mentioned that the whole reason for the facility was to bring together experts from the various product lines to be able to work with manufacturers and quickly arrive at the best solution. It also helps provide better service, support, and input for future product improvements.

Pharmaceutical Technology magazine published an interesting article by Emerson's Bob Lenich and Christie Deitz. The article, A Look at 30 Years of Change in Pharmaceutical Automation, recounts the changes affecting Life Science manufacturers from the late 1970s though today. I joined the world of process automation in the early 80s as a summer systems engineering intern in offshore oil and gas production and this article brought back some memories of the amazing changes we've seen.

I'll highlight some items from the article to see if it generates any nostalgic thoughts for you.

Although the distributed control system came along in the mid-70s, Bob and Christie note that most life science companies used pneumatic and single-loop electronic controllers. Data was collected manually or with circular and strip charts.

With growing U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations through the late 70s and early 80s, the DCS began to be seen by life science manufacturers as a tool to help comply.

Batch-based automation systems, the first one being the PROVOX system, came out in the early-to-mid 80s to help with sequencing, failure handling, parallel unit operations, and the creation of recipes.

Just a few years before I recall a little collaborative effort between IBM and Microsoft being introduced to the market (wow a 4.77MHz CPU!) This would have some impact in our industry in the following decade as commercially available technologies (COTS) were incorporated.

Toward the later part of the 80s and into the 90s, standards began to play a larger role. ISA-88 (S88), a batch automation standard was important to life science manufacturers. The digital busses including Foundation fieldbus were developing, and Microsoft operating systems began to make their appearance in systems like the DeltaV system. For communications, the OLE for Process Control (OPC) standard became the way to connect Microsoft-based clients and servers--a big improvement over earlier generation DDE communications technologies.

Automation systems became increasingly modular with class-based configurations. These technologies would help the trend toward more modular construction techniques that brought production on-line quicker compared with prior construction and engineering methods.

Regulations continued to advance to try to address concerns around system, production and data management through the balance of the 90s. Efforts began on the ISA-95 (S95) standard to better define the integration of enterprise and control systems.

These regulations had a positive impact in building competency around data security, record security, lot tracking, and overall batch management. The downside was that it placed the focus of life science manufacturers on meeting regulations rather than continually improving their manufacturing operations compared with other industries.

The FDA's Process Analytical Technologies (PAT) initiative addressed this by changing the focus from meeting regulations to improving operation. The FDA's cGMPs for the 21^st Century added in using a risk-based approach to these improvements. As part of this initiative, they encouraged the use of innovative technologies. We've addressed a number of these innovations with respect to PAT in earlier posts.

Bob and Christie closed the article with a note of how flexibility and the integration of automation with the business-level systems is becoming increasingly important as life science manufacturers move from organic-based synthesis to biologics to continue to develop vaccines and medicines to address our health needs.

Update: Thank you Eric for pointing out the error of my ways! The link to the OPC Foundation has been corrected.

I was catching up on my RSS feeds over our middle of the week U.S. Independence Day holiday. My RSS search feed on the IEC 61511 global safety standard (ISA 84.01 in the U.S.) turned up this press release on a DVD set released by the Safety Users Group. They describe the purpose of this production:

In the style of a documentary, this unique DVD will provide you with expert points of view, as well as specific concepts, definitions, experiences, examples, analysis and results from 11 world-renowned professionals in the safety industry. These experts are designers, manufacturing leaders, engineering companies, integrators, standards members, professors, legal council and TÜV certified Functional Safety experts.

Emerson's Thomas Steiner is one of the safety experts interviewed. He is one of a large number of Emerson certified functional safety experts (CFSE) and certified functional safety professionals (CFSP). The mission of this certification process as stated on the CFSE.org site:

The CFSE (Certified Functional Safety Expert) concept was originally developed by TÜV and exida with the support of other international safety experts to ensure that personnel performing SIS lifecycle activities are competent as required by the IEC 61508, 61511, and 62061 standards.

Thomas discusses some of the basic terminology from the standards such as safe failure fractions (SFF), safety requirement specifications (SRS), and safety integrity levels (SIL) in a very understandable way. He describes how it applies to process manufacturers in applying this standard. You can see his entire interview (16:54) on the EasyDeltaV.com web site.

Overall, there is quite a bit of safety expertise provided by the 11 participants on this two-DVD set. The cost is $115 (USD) and you can get a preview by viewing this trailer of the type of information presented.

If your responsibilities include the IEC 61511 safety lifecycle and you need a good primer or refresher from knowledgeable safety experts, consider this DVD set as one of your learning resources.

Emerson's Pete Sharpe, an advanced automation consultant, was recently interviewed for a magazine article on the subject of process manufacturers' aging workforce. Manufacturers primarily in North America and Western Europe are feeling this loss of experience due to retirement.

Pete indicated that the reoccurring theme he hears is the loss of deep process knowledge. This knowledge, possessed by experienced operators, maintenance technicians and senior automation engineers is knowing when something in the process is not quite right, like when a measurement reading looks off, or when the process behavior is not the same. As seasoned operators retire, manufacturers feel this loss of experience most during non-normal conditions like startup, shutdown, or emergency situations.

Problems take longer to diagnose and resolve which can lead to less stable, more dangerous conditions. A recent refinery accident is one example where the problem diagnosis did not occur soon enough. You don't ever hear about most incidents but they certainly cost manufacturers money and often result in close calls that don't actually shut down a unit.

Pete discussed a couple of things automation suppliers are doing to address these issues. The first is improved operator training simulators, which I have written about in earlier blog posts. In this environment, less experienced operators can be challenged with operating problem situations so that they can improve their ability to diagnose the process and respond more quickly to abnormal situations.

As technologies continue to advance, more diagnostic capabilities are available in smart field devices and other plant assets. These devices can provide early warning about their own health and about the surrounding process. These predictive capabilities improve the ability of the maintenance organization to prioritize and respond to critical equipment alerts. Emerson's Abnormal Situation Prevention (ASP) algorithm uses process statistical signature data to give less experienced operators more time to react to abnormal situations and more diagnostic information to point to the root cause of the abnormal situation.

The final advancements that help to close the experience gap are advanced control technologies. As the technology has gotten increasingly scalable and easier to deploy in control systems like the DeltaV system, more and more processes can be operated as units and not as collections of loops. These APC technologies operate a process unit within its equipment constraints, at its most economical point. The operator's role changes from constantly adjusting individual loops to setting targets and constraint limits. APC applications are especially useful for process units that are tricky to run by less experienced operators--where many of the loops interact with one another or the process is highly constrained.

These advancements help ease the learning curve for future operators, maintenance technicians and automation engineers. On the positive side, today's engineers and young operators are nearly all computer-literate, so they can make good use of the modern tools and work processes that come with today's control infrastructure. This computer-savvy generation is more likely to adapt to computer-based control systems and modern fieldbus architectures. In addition, automation suppliers like Emerson are helping to ease this knowledge gap by having people like Pete and the other advanced automation consultants available to work with process manufacturers.

John Egnew, a training consultant and instructor in Emerson's Educational Services has posted another tip in his series of looptips. John's looptip #12 is entitled Don't Throw Away a Good Thing.

In it, he references how a positioner used on a control valve in a fast-acting loop may actually make the loop more unstable or difficult to control. The likely culprit may be too high of a loop gain. An example of this type of loop might be a fast fluid flow application.

If this is the case, the solution is having the travel feedback signal from the positioner be the inner loop of a cascaded loop. The inner loop of cascade control must be faster than the outer loop.

He also offers specific recommendations whether your loop is running under electronic or pneumatic control.

I hope these tips along with some of the wisdom conveyed by Terry Blevins and Greg McMillan over on the ModelingAndControl.com blog help you tackle some of these situations which can impact the performance of your process.

For those of you challenged with the vagaries of pH control, I wanted to make sure you had seen the news of an upcoming pH Control web seminar, arranged by ISA, featuring ModelingAndControl.com's Greg McMillan. The web seminar covers the root causes of poor performance in pH control systems.

In a recent post, Greg describes how he plans to share his experiences:

I spent a lot of time on pH startups. I found most of the key design concepts needed for success where not discussed anywhere, For example, the normal dip tube design for reagent injection is disastrous and the mixing and valve resolution requirements are exceptional. I discovered how I could reduce the number of stages of neutralization, offer inexpensive alternatives to the classical neutralization vessel, and decide when signal characterization could help or hurt your control objectives.

Unlike his recently released free eBook, this May 16 web seminar (2:00pm - 3:30pm Eastern U.S. Time) does have a cost. It's $195 (USD) for ISA members and $225 (USD) for non-members. If you're not the lone person in your organization who struggles with pH control, Greg suggests:

The seminar is much more cost effective if the registrant connects in a conference room with a computer projector.

If you can't make this event, Greg has also published a book on this topic, Advanced pH Measurement and Control, 3rd Edition.

A concern I've written about in this blog's education category is that much knowledge in control theory and automation practices is disappearing as our "baby boom" generation begins to retire.

We are constantly trying new approaches to capture and present the knowledge for current and future automation professionals to discover. An example of this includes Terry Blevins and Greg McMillan's ModelingAndControl.com blog.

Another example is the Process Control Insights area on the EasyDeltaV.com site which features application notes, lectures, and links to books written by Greg McMillan.

Greg just announced another project on which our team has been working again in the spirit of sharing the knowledge. Of one of his no-longer-in-print books, he wrote:

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Control Room is my favorite because it presented detailed results of solving tough process control problems in a creative way to help open minds to new possibilities and concepts. This book is out of print but thanks to Deborah Franke at Emerson Process Management, it can be viewed for free in its electronic form... [emphasis added]

This was a case of the publisher turning the copyright over to Greg after the book had been out of print for some time. Instead of collecting dust in a box somewhere, Deb Franke worked with Greg and led the effort to get the book published in the Process Control Insights area of the website.

Over time, we hope to add more works for current and future automation professionals to discover.

Emerson Educational Services' John Egnew has posted another LoopTip, entitled Is Your Process a Real Character? In it, he explores loops that are in constant need of retuning.

The likely situation is that the process that the loop controls is non-linear.

The solution is either to take advantage on gain scheduling, where the gain of the loop is changed based on which operating region the loop is trying to control. This solution only works for the automation systems which support gain scheduling or built-in adaptive modeling.

John notes that you can select control valves with non-linear characteristics which offset the non-linearity of the process. He describes it:

The control valve characteristic is used to compensate for the process gain to achieve an approximate installed linear process.

He does note it is difficult to exactly get the non-linearities to cancel one another out, but that at least you can come close in approximating a linear constant gain process and be in better shape than before you made the change.

I'm checking back in with Emerson Education Center's John Egnew on the great work he continues to do with his Loop Tips.

Since I last checked in, John has added two more tips: The Tricky Transmitter, and The Process that Changes its Mind.

The tricky transmitter tip deals with the case where you might perform transmitter zero and span calibration (or re-ranging.) The operators may notice a change in the loop performance which changes the gain in the transmitter. John shows the math and the corrective action to take (changing the controller gain for those of you who don't follow hyperlinks J. )

In the process that changes its mind, John discusses the case where loops behave differently at different times, going between stable and unstable operation. Most processes have changing process gains. Adjustments to controller gain can be done manually (for very slow changing processes) or through adaptive gain control strategies.

As software continues to get more sophisticated, it can help monitor control performance in each of the loops. By identifying and diagnosing problem loops, recommending tuning and maintenance improvements and continuously adapting to these changing process conditions the effects of nonlinear gain can be mitigated. DeltaV InSight is an example of this type of control performance software.

I need to work with the team to figure out how we can get an RSS feed of these great tips so that anyone interested in keeping up with these tips can subscribe to John's excellent work. There I go again harping about RSS!

Since the ModelingAndControl.com blog was launched a few months back, Terry Blevins and Greg McMillan have been sharing their expertise in process control gained from years of plant and R&D experience. It's a real treasure trove if you want to learn more about process dynamics, process modeling, and technologies and control strategies to consider in better managing your process.

We decided to put together an area on the EasyDeltaV.com website called Process Control Insights to provide a common area for people to find this experience. As a new, global generation of process automation professional joins us, the hope is that they'll find sites like this to connect to the wisdom of those who lived it for so many years. We are pleased that Greg allowed us to give this a try with much of his work. Here's Process Control Insights' mission:

Welcome to Process Control Insights -- your central spot to learn and explore the nature of process control and its fundamental relationships with your processes. We hope this helps you gain a better understanding of the true nature of these dynamics and how it can help you optimize your process.

The site currently includes application notes, lectures, links to written books, and of course links back to the ModelingAndControl.com site. I had a chance to sit down with Greg before the holidays and record a presentation he had recently given to a major pharmaceutical manufacturer on using modeling and advanced control strategies in a batch manufacturing process. Although these control strategies are common in continuous processes, there use in batch processes is still in its infancy.

You can get a flavor for the lecture by listening to the Introduction Batch Control Story. I have some work to do to get the audio better for future lectures. (Hmmm Gary... I hear I'm not alone in this!)

We hope over time to have others provide their real-world experience and expertise to shorten the learning curve for our next generation of process control experts.

For those like me who were college educated in the pre-internet, pre-Google days you can really appreciate how access to information required for learning has gotten easier. With a Google search bar and some quiet time, you can become conversational on nearly any topic in a few minutes and on the road to being an expert with some more time. There is no way we could learn this quickly in the days of libraries and books.

I bring this up because Terry Blevins, co-author of the Modeling and Control blog, and Emerson's Marcos Peluso have made their "best of" Foundation Fieldbus tutorial presentations available over on the EasyDeltaV.com website. This tutorial is covered in 12 parts from a very basic Fieldbus Overview to Advanced Functionality. The presentation series includes:

• Fieldbus Overview
• Justifying Fieldbus
• Example Applications
• Installation of Fieldbus
• Devices Available
• Fieldbus Standard
• Fieldbus Communication
• Fieldbus Function Blocks
• Fieldbus Diagnostics
• Fieldbus EDDL
• HSE Fieldbus
• Advanced Fieldbus

As technologists, Terry and Marcos have created a presentation series which more deeply explores the workings of Foundation fieldbus. This series complements the modules in PlantWeb University in the Foundation fieldbus section in the way an advanced class complements the introductory class.

If you happen to be searching around for information on Foundation Fieldbus and happen upon this blog post, enjoy the fact how quickly you can get conversational or become a true expert based on the time you spend following some of the links.

In his continuing series of Loop Tips, John Egnew, a training consultant and instructor for Emerson's Educational Services group discusses the impact of final control element deadband on loops.

His Loop Tip #8: A Chance For Stardom, discusses the case when some loops prove to be difficult to tune, no matter what algorithm is used. He recommends you look at the control valve's deadband which is typically caused by friction and lost motion. John states:

This friction from valve packing, seals, or process buildup can cause valve deadband to be at least 5%.

In the Education category of this blog you'll see quite a number of posts recommending the best way to approach this tuning, including some of John's excellent tips.

In addition to the many presentations and demonstrations Terry Blevins and Greg McMillan have been giving this week, they have also gotten out some more jewels on their ModelingAndControl.com blog. Greg has also been showing fresh off the press copies of his new book, Bioprocess Modeling and Control: Maximizing Process Analytical Technology Benefits.

Terry offers up a Basics of Advanced Control post including the overview from his award-winning Advanced Control Unleashed book. He notes that the proceeds from this book go to "universities, consortia, and educational programs to promote and enhance the development and use of advanced process control."

Greg tackles the issues associated with measuring pH in his post, Techniques to Improve pH Measurement Performance. He includes his thoughts on improving pH electrode performance and his unique humor on the top 10 signs of a rough pH startup. I like seeing his natural sense of humor coming early in the life of this blog. Keep it coming!

It's great to see this wisdom put out in blog posts and books. Check out their posts and add your wisdom in the comments section.

The overall IQ of the blogosphere just went up a few notches. It's great to see Terry Blevins and Greg McMillan collaborating on the ModelingAndControl.com blog.

They are off to flying start to help us better understand process control. As I've mentioned in several recent posts on education, this is one of the most pressing issues facing process manufacturers as automation and control professionals retire.

Terry starts with a post about Control Basics and Terminology. He shares a class he put together around process control complete with tests.

Greg starts with a post, Unification of PID Controller Tuning Rules. Greg offers his top ten reasons to devise your own tuning rule and simulation test.

If these first two posts are any indication of what's to come, then you want to subscribe to their RSS feed. If you're unfamiliar with RSS, give our RSS Start Kit a two-minute peek.

As the international safety standard IEC 61511 (ISA S84.02 in the U.S.) has provided process manufacturers a risk-based approach to safety in their plants.

Many organizations including Emerson are providing training and project execution services to assist these manufacturers in better understanding and complying with this standard. I've mentioned some of the training courses in an earlier safety engineering training post.

Obviously it takes people experienced in process safety to develop this training and execute safety projects. I had the opportunity to catch up with Bob Gale, a certified SIS Consultant and SIS lead in our Refining and Chemical industry organization. He has over 30 years of process automation experience, 20 of these in process safety, and is nationally recognized for his work in the development of the American Institute of Chemical Engineer's (AIChE) chemical process safety practice guidelines.

Bob was also instrumental in helping the Refining and Chemical become part of Emerson's global effort to achieve TÜV-certification in Functional Safety Management Systems in accordance with IEC 61511 for management and control of safety instrumented systems (SIS) applications.

Bob recently served as an SIS Consultant for a DeltaV SIS system used in an ultra low sulfur diesel plant application. In this capacity, he and the Emerson SIS project experts work with the manufacturer to verify the appropriate SIL levels and risk mitigation strategies of the safety instrumented system along with assisting the client with the conceptual design of the various Safety Instrumented Functions. Bob also works with manufacturers on all the earlier phases of the safety life cycle, from the Process Hazard Analysis through to Layer of Protection Analysis and SIL Determination.

For those working to achieve IEC 61511 compliance, Bob believes the place to start is with the education on the standard to understand the scope of the safety lifecycle. Of course he also believes you should assemble an experienced project team to help from the up front analysis, through the engineering, installation, commissioning, and ongoing support phases.

The need to educate newer process automation engineers has been a continuing conversation among the process automation blogs (examples here, here, and here.)

I caught up with Norm Ito, a variability management specialist who helps process manufacturers optimize the performance of regulatory control and instrumentation using the EnTech process.

Norm feels that the tremendous advancements in automation technology have caused the focus of education to be on the software, displays, and information integration. What has been missing is the focus on the basics of control, including effective loop turning methods and evaluation techniques required to optimize the process.

Through Emerson Educational Services, Norm has been trying to address this shortcoming by teaching a Modern Loop Tuning course. The course is designed for engineers, operations, and maintenance folks involved from design, evaluation, implementation, or tuning of the controls within the process. It begins with a basis for understanding the complexity and interaction of a process, its dynamics, and how to tune the controls to remove process variability. This variability can impact the quality of what's being produced as well as the stability of the running process.

Norm believes the learning best happens by taking a very practical, hands on approach. His students use dynamic simulators to demonstrate and practice various loop tuning rules and see their impact on the simulated process. Through this process, a better understanding of the process dynamics and loop interactions is developed which is the first step towards selection of a suitable control strategy and tuning parameters.

With this basis of understanding of process control and process dynamics, the ultimate goal is to optimize the performance of the process. Norm and the team of variability management specialists take a holistic view to performance optimization by helping process manufacturers remove constraints and sources of instability though proper process design, control strategy application, effective instrumentation, in addition to this robust loop tuning technique.

Adding to the conversation of the Truth about controlling processes... post and response by Emerson's Terry Blevins, is this response from Greg McMillan. Greg is the author of quite a few books on tuning and control which you can see in the DeltaV Bookstore and an author in the monthly Control Talk column in Control magazine.

Greg adds:

The tuning techniques published by David St. Clair are essentially the ultimate oscillation and reaction curve methods developed by Ziegler-Nichols. These models each use two dynamic parameters. An ultimate gain and ultimate period is identified during closed loop tests (controller in automatic) for the ultimate oscillation method. A time delay and ramp rate is identified during open loop tests (controller in manual) for the reaction curve method. Time constants along with the dead time dominant, self-regulating, and integrating responses are also introduced in the publication to help discuss how the ultimate period varies from two to four times the time delay. Laplace transforms are added to explain dynamics and the PID algorithm. The techniques end up with five parameters and three types of processes, which is the same complexity as methods that more explicitly use a model. What seems to be the difference is that the user does not have to identify a process gain. Actually, this process gain is darn easy to find, in that for an integrating process, the integrating process gain is the ramp rate identified in the reaction curve method (same parameter with just an older name). Further, if you multiply this reaction curve ramp rate by the process time constant (largest time constant), you get the process gain for a self-regulating process. Alternately, in an open loop test self-regulating processes, the user could wait for the process to line out and divide the final change in the process variable in percent by the change in controller output in percent. The user just needs to remember to use percent instead of engineering units because the PID algorithm is based on a percent input and output.

The literal use of the reaction curve method assumes the process is lined out. This is rarely the case for tough loops and integrating processes. If a person understands the concept of an integrating process gain, he or she would realize to use the change in ramp rates rather than the lone ramp rate depicted in the reaction curve method.

In fact, all major tuning methods (e.g. Ziegler-Nichols ultimate oscillation and reaction curve, Lambda tuning, and Internal Model Control) for both self-regulating and integrating process reduce to the same form when the user wants maximum performance. Framing tuning techniques in terms of a simple model (process gain. time delay, and time constant) provides this insight. It also allows you to estimate the effect of plant dynamics on performance. If the user understands the sources of time delay and time constants (e.g. transportation delays, thermowell lags, mixing delays, deadband, sticktion, control communication and execution intervals), the ultimate performance of a control system can be improved. My November Control Talk column will explain the unification of tuning methods and the implications.

If the valve size or the calibration span of an instrument is changed, a user knows how to proportionally change the controller gain based on the change in process gain.

Nonlinearities are prevalent in process control but this is more of a reason to have a simple model so that nonlinearity can be identified and quantified. The user then has the option to schedule the controller tuning based on operating regions or use signal characterization. For example, signal characterization of a pH measurement based on the slope of the titration curve (process gain) has proven to be simple and extremely effective. For nonlinear valve characteristics, the combination of a digital positioner and low friction packing combined with signal characterization of the controller output significantly reduces the nonlinearity from deadband, sticktion, and valve trim. In both cases, the improvement in performance is particularly impressive for operation on the flat portions (low gain) portions of the curve.

The introduction of a fast secondary controller can remove most of the nonlinearity seen by the primary controller in a cascade control system. Also, reducing the time delay and improving the tuning enables a controller to stay closer to set point so that the loop sees less of operating point nonlinearities. This is an important technique for pH, reaction, and distillation column control.

Changes in model parameters provide insight as to what has changed in the plant whether it is an increase fouling of a sensor or heat transfer surface or sticktion in a valve. Models offer plant knowledge and allow you to take the blindfolds off. How you use the models are up to you but ignoring them increases war stories and myths and endless meetings where people go around in circle as to what is wrong and could be better. Some processes have been trying to solve the same old problem for decades because there are no models. A model is even more important if you consider process engineers are taught to think steady state, statisticians analyze snapshots of data, and operators want an instantaneous response. The ability to tune a controller from the same model is a plus.

We should not forget the great contributions from the past but we need to move on and seek greater knowledge and performance of our plants.

A while back I saw a Walt Boyes' post entitled, The truth about controlling processes... in which he captures the response of Walter Drieger to a post on the Automation List at Control.com.

Walter's response had some pointed statements like:

All process control loops are nonlinear. That is why the math you learned in school is useless.

I normally don't take the time to respond to blogs if I think the topic is not been well framed. However, in this case I am making an exception since I find the comments to be misleading and thus should not be left unchallenged.

For many years I was responsible for the design, implementation and startup of advanced and regulator control strategies for control systems installed in the pulp and paper industry. Commissioning the control was especially challenging on faster processes, such as boiler combustion control, since there was often little time to establish the control tuning. In many cases there was the opportunity to make a small change in the controller output, observe the dynamic response of the process and then set the tuning before placing the control in automatic. What I quickly learned was that control tuning must be based on an understanding of the process. Specifically, to tune PID controller feedback or feedforward strategies in single loop of multi-loop configurations such as cascade or override control, it is necessary to understand the dynamic response of the process to changes in process inputs.

Often times the process response to a step change in the process input may be described in general terms such as the process has low gain i.e. little change in the process output for a change in the process input or there was little delay in the process response or the process was slow to respond. However, to establish control tuning setting, it is necessary to describe the process response in quantifiable terms. For self-regulating processes, the open loop response is often characterized in terms of process gain, deadtime, and time constant. If the control is associated with an integrating process, then the response may be characterized by the integrating gain and deadtime. Such characterization of the process dynamic response is commonly called the step response model. Similarly, the process dynamic response associated with feedback control may be characterized or modeled under closed loop conditions in terms of ultimate gain and ultimate period.

The techniques described by David St. Clair in Controller Tuning and Control Loop Performance and any number of references on this subject of tuning are fundamentally based on a knowledge of process dynamic response, the ability to characterize (model) the response, and to use this understanding in setting control tuning.

Much has been made recently of the need to pass along the expertise of seasoned automation and control professionals to the next generation of automation and control engineers. I have been trying to highlight our role in this process in the Emerson Process Expert's Education category.

You can also see focus in this area of Education by Control magazine's Walt Boyes and Automation World magazine's Gary Mintchell in their respective blogs.

I mentioned the work of John Egnew, a Training Consultant and Instructor in our Educational Services group in an earlier post about the Loop Tips he has been sharing. His stated purpose:

"Loop Tips" is a compilation of years of experience with loop devices and controller tuning necessary for keeping control loops operating at the desired performance levels.

His latest addition, How Fast Do You Want It? explores what to do when your controller tuning is not achieving the desired close loop performance.

One of the real treats for me is to speak with some of the great technologists we have here our Emerson Austin, Texas location. I caught up with Greg McMillan, a Control magazine hall-of-fame winner, and co-writer of the McMillan & Weiner series of humorous yet educational writings.

Greg provides his expertise to the DeltaV embedded advanced process control (APC) developments. He's also just co-authored a book about to go to press on bioprocess modeling and control which will be available in the October timeframe. Several of Greg's books are available in the DeltaV Bookstore. I'll point out when this newest one becomes available in the bookstore or you can find it right now on the ISA website.

Greg has a way of making the complex understandable. I caught a sneak peak at the McMillan & Weiner August Control Talk column where Greg compares control concepts like loop dead time, open-loop and close-loop error, non-self regulating processes, etc. with the impacts of imbibing alcohol. Many of us can immediately grasp these control concepts when they hit so close to home. These analogies really help make difficult control theories easier to learn and retain.

As he has been doing for years, Greg will be presenting at the Emerson Exchange in early October. If you go (the Early Bird conference rate expires August 21^st), make sure to check out one of his sessions. He'll also be presenting in the next few weeks at Control magazine's Automation Xchange where he'll discuss talk about advanced control myths, case histories, and lessons learned. Some of these control myths Greg has shared in one of his columns so you can get a preview of his ideas.

This expertise in control in invaluable to future generations of control engineers and it's great that Greg and many others continue to share their expertise with others.

As we all seem to be more than ever pressed for time, improving our skills through training seems harder to do. eLearning has advanced to help overcome the obstacles of time away, travel and living costs, etc. by bringing it to us over the Internet—if we can squeeze a window of focused time required for effective learning.

Process manufacturers in their pursuit of financial stability have squeezed many areas of their businesses including their operations staff levels. This makes time away for training even more difficult.

I’ve discussed in earlier posts some of the innovations Emerson’s Educational Services has been doing to meet the needs given these trends. They recently announced the DeltaV Operator eLearning program to provide this training over the Internet for those who enroll to receive this training.

I caught up with Instructor Troy Nelson who put together this eLearning curriculum for Operators. He cited some interesting facts from a St. John’s University study on adult learning which said 45% of us are primarily hands-on learners (kinesthetic learning), 30% are visual learners, and the remaining 25% are audio learners.

With this in mind, Troy and the team designed the Operator eLearning curriculum with over 50 demonstration videos, interactive practice sessions, and interactive workshops to provide for various ways we learn. And audio runs throughout these sessions to cover those audio learners.

Troy also felt it was important to keep each lesson to about 15 minutes to keep the lesson focused and keep the participant’s attention. Even though the full curriculum takes a little over a day (or a long day for those motivated folks), each enrolled student has three months to access the material as often as they would like.

You can see a quick preview of an Operator lesson here.

A colleague passed along the June edition of Control magazine with a marking on page 34 in their All Around Loop Controllers resource guide section.

It had a Tuning Tips Newsletter section courtesy of Emerson's Educational Services group.

The page is put together by John Egnew, a Training Consultant and Instructor for Emerson Process Management. John's purpose with these loop tips is to provide a compilation of years of experience with loop devices and controller tuning necessary for keeping control loops operating at the desired performance levels.

At the time of this writing there are six loop tips including:

• Do you always trust your flights to auto pilot?
• Is something dead in your loop?
• Do you understand your process?
• The Sticky Wicket Valve
• Getting tired of trial and error tuning?
• A Bigger Valve Is Not Always Better

The All Around Loop Controllers resource guide page also highlights Greg McMillan's Good Tuning: A Pocket Guide, 2nd Edition book which is available in the DeltaV Bookstore and Process Control Video Training also available from Educational Services.

In AutomationWorld magazine Editor-in-Chief Gary Mintchell's recent blog post, Safety Integrated System training, he describes an SIS training course recommended by a former colleague.

I caught up with Pat Garland in Emerson's Educational Services organization to see what training we were offering to help automation professionals learn the ins and outs of the safety including the global safety standard IEC 61511 (ISA S84 in the U.S.)

Along with a lot of efforts in other parts of Emerson Process Management developing safety instrumented system (SIS) products, SIS project services, and ongoing SIS lifecyle services, the Educational Services team has developed courses around safety from basic understanding of terminology and global standards to more specific product training.

Pat specifically pointed me to some on-line eLearning courses which include a Safety Engineering Overview and a more in depth Safety Engineering course. You can see sample courseware here (requires Flash player.)

These are paid for classes but include access to the course for three months and email access to Emerson safety experts for this three month duration. Based upon the feedback of automation professionals who have participated in the various forms of education services, many more eLearning modules are in development.

Pat has posted his email on the eLearning page, so fire away if you have questions or post comments here.

Finally, speaking of commitment to education, it was great to read Control magazine Editor-in-Chief Walt Boye's blog post today, More on "Being the Solution..."

Emerson Process Management is the undisputed king of giving to colleges, universities and technical trade schools, as near as I can tell. They have donated millions of dollars worth of field instruments and DeltaV systems, or sold them to academic institutions at cost, depending on the need of the particular institution. In particular, they've donated to the three North American Fieldbus education centers a whole lot.

What Emerson does is the template for the first way to expend education resources: support actual engineering education. This must be done. Thank you for being part of the solution. Please don't stop.