Good building mechanical design requires a firm grasp of the mechanical engineering fundamentals (thermodynamics, psychrometrics, the fan laws, etc.). The same can be said about the BAS design needed ...

PID (proportional, integral, derivative) control has existed for decades and there are many tools available to help implement PID to tune process control systems, thereby making it generally easy to ...

Power plants–especially coal-fired boilers–pose a set of process control problems unparalleled in other industries. Rapid load ramps, continuous unit demand changes, variable fuel quality and process ...

The tuning of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control loops was an important change at HollyFrontier’s Navajo Refinery in Artesia, N.M. Its hands-on, “mandraulic” culture was no longer cutting ...

Steve Sandler explains what every engineer should know about ‘non-invasive’ stability assessments. The non-invasive stability assessment is a method that uses an output impedance measurement to ...

Switching power supplies rely on feedback control loops to ensure that the required voltage and current are maintained under varying load conditions. Design of the feedback control loop influences ...

Machines and processes are controlled using many strategies, from simple ladder logic to custom algorithms for specialized process control, but proportional-integral-derivative (PID) is the most ...

Spare a moment’s pity for the process engineer, whose job it is to keep industrial automation running no matter what. These poor souls seem to be forever on call, fielding panicked requests to come to ...

All power supplies require some type of feedback loop to regulate the output voltage. A simplified diagram of a buck controller is shown in Figure 1 with a pulse ...

Texas Instruments is developing GaN power devices to enable more compact and efficient motor joints for humanoid robots.