Advanced Tuning Tackles a Nonlinear World
"Sure, if I had more time, eventually I could figure out the best tuning for our batch system. But this thing is complicated and I'd have to drop my project progress to get it right. There just doesn't seem to be enough time to get everything just right."
What if you could actually buy time? What if there were a way to test control strategies and tuning in minutes instead of days? Emerson's own Terry Blevins and Greg McMillan suggest that dynamic process simulation can compress long response times or batch cycles into just a few minutes in an article edited by Kenna Amos in Automation World magazine called, "Advanced Tuning Tackles a Nonlinear World (230KB PDF)." Simulations can be run faster than real time to test out control approaches and to show operators the future results of their actions in just a few minutes. In the case of very slow batch cycles of say bioreactors, this can be a huge advantage. OK it isn't really "time in a bottle" but you can use time to your advantage with dynamic simulations to straighten out control issues.
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