How could I not attend an Emerson Exchange with a title like this? Emerson’s Rick Osborne and Caltrol’s Wayne Harbert presented this workshop. Their abstract:
How to make your process better and your life easier is a pretty common goal for most of us in the process controls industry. Digital technologies have brought opportunities galore to enhance the process but are you taking advantage of those opportunities or could you be working against your best interest in attempts to use the digital technology? We will explore several opportunities to meet our goal by focusing attention of how to get the most out your digital valve positioner.
Rick opened with a discussion of Foundation Fieldbus. Knowing mode and status are key. Fault state is a way to tell the valve controller what to do in case of a fault condition such as go to fail safe, hold for 3 seconds, etc.
Rick discussed control in the field where the PID loop runs in the digital valve controller instead of the control system. Speed of execution was a key reason to take this approach.
Wayne described performance diagnostics such as air mass flow, friction tests, and real-time alerting of alert conditions. A triggered profile provides an event-based diagnostic that captures a buffer of data before and after the event condition. It’s a recorder of what happened around the event. The data is is saved in the DVC.
He discussed travel and pressure control. The DVC6200F can control based on pressure or valve travel. Controlling based on pressure is standard I/P capability, but some take this approach to keep a common set of components and spares in their plants.
These capabilities provide improved control. Are you taking advantage of them in your digital valve controller devices?
