Michael Brown's Basic Troubleshooting and Loop Tuning

NOW AVAILABLE ON CD

(Not for sale in Southern Africa)

Michael Brown Control Engineering now offers a new and very practical approach to the basics of regulatory control loop optimisation. This is a course consisting of 31 chapters and based on articles on the subject Michael Brown has written over the past few years. The course covers some of the fundamentals of the subject, and careful study of the various chapters will allow you to gain a really good understanding of some of the really practical principles of optimising simple loops.

The course is offered on a CD which can be purchased from Michael Brown Control Engineering. For prices and ordering information, please contact the company at michael.brown@pixie.co.za . Please specify which country you are ordering from, as there are differing price structures for different countries because of postage costs. Unfortunately the CD is not for sale in South Africa.

DESCRIPTION OF CD CONTENTS
"The True Magic Is To Really Understand What You Are Doing"

This CD offers a new and very straight forward and easily understandable approach to the basics of practical regulatory control. This differs considerably from the very mathematical and idealistic standpoint from which control is normally taught by most academic institutions.

My approach is based on work performed over 20 years in literally hundreds of plants in many countries around the world, where we have found that in general at least 85% of all regulatory control loops operate extremely inefficiently in automatic. Over 50% of most loops have problems in them. (Usually people in the plants are completely unaware of these problems). After performing optimisation in these plants, control performance of virtually every loop worked on is vastly improved. Very often literally hundreds of times better.

To be able to optimise loops successfully, it is essential that the person doing the work understands the true practicalities behind control. Apart from a good basic knowledge and understanding of the process itself, and of the control requirements, he or she must be able to analyse each loop to ascertain the type of process dynamics, to determine if any problems exist in the loop, and then finally to apply the most appropriate type of tuning to achieve optimum performance for that particular loop.

Our experience to date is that very few people have any real understanding of the true practicalities of control, as they have never been taught this, and have had to "feel their way", which often results in incorrect concepts, and lack of ability to optimise loops to operate efficiently.

The contents of this CD address the correct approach, and deals with all the elements in the loop, including the process.

The following subjects are covered:

• Process classes and dynamics.
• Final control elements.
• Digital controllers.
• Tuning.
• Many other subjects, including problems that may be encountered with digital measuring techniques, noise and filtering, and non-linearity in control loops.

Once this CD has been properly studied, it will be possible for the student to tackle optimisation with much more understanding and confidence. 

For prices and ordering information, please contact the company at michael.brown@mweb.co.za

More information and examples of Loop Signatures