TABLE OF CONTENTS Some might call this category "process control" or "instrumentation and control," because the material in these topics is closest to the historical scope of ISA and is consistent with ISA's original name, Instrument Society of America. But today, proportional, integral, derivative (PID) and other continuous control techniques are used in many applications outside the process industries. For example, they are used in areas such as automotive paint shop controls, motion controls, electrical equipment controls, building automation, ship stabilization controls, and many, many other areas.
PID is so pervasive that one could not be considered well educated as an automation professional if he or she does not know the basic concepts of PID and PID tuning. In fact, the CAP Steering Team decided early on that, while many people today work with manufacturing automation information technology that does not involve basic plant floor control, it did not make sense for them to be called automation professionals without knowing the basics of plant floor control including continuous control.
Measurements are extremely important in any automation task. It is really true you can control well only those things that you can measure and accuracy and reliability requirements are continuing to increase. Continuous instrumentation is required in many applications throughout automation, although here we call it process instrumentation because the particular type of transmitter...
