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In Memory of Julie Cappelletti-Lange,

Vice President 1984-2012
1501 E. Woodfield Road, Suite 400N
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editorial team
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Ian Verhappen, Stan Weiner

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Why you arent running Foundation

Lambda tuning is hard to beat

Regarding Is backwards compatibility

holding us back? by Ian Verhappen [June
16, p. 23, www.controlglobal.com/articles/2016/is-backwards-compatibility-holding-us-back], Im sure you remember that
the ISA50.02 standards development that
was adopted as Foundation Fieldbus H1
was based on the assumption that field instrumentation was, at that
time (1985-1992), pure 4-20
mA analog. This was the
pre-HART era, so it was
logical to assume that new
plant construction or major revamps would replace
these accurate but dumb
devices with smart digital
devices. In reality, HART
was introduced and widely
installed, but is only semismart because it cant run function blocks.
HART became ubiquitous because
vendors chose to price HART instruments at parity with plain analog instruments, price Foundation Fieldbus H1 at
a premium, and not implement Foundation Fieldbus HSE (the best H2 available).
Vendors correctly evaluated Foundation
Fieldbus HSE as a significant threat to
their I/O business and as a threat to their
ability to retain their customer base. Without HSE and its potential to eliminate I/O
interface cards, the higher cost of Foundation Fieldbus H1 instruments did not save
enough money on installation cost to be
justified.
Today, users like ExxonMobil are faced
with millions of installed, good working HART instruments with perhaps 20
or more years of service lifenot to be
sacrificed to a better architecture. That
is why the ExxonMobil architecture includes a patent-pending device called a
digital control node (DCN) that is envisioned to add Foundation function blocks
to HART instrumentation, and connect
with a high-speed Ethernet network such
as Foundation Fieldbus HSE.

Thanks for the blog post, How to be

a world traveler in process control, by
Greg McMillan (www.controlglobal.
com/blogs/controltalkblog/how-to-be-aworld-traveler-in-process-control/). It is
interesting to get a more diverse viewpoint, as most people stay in particular industries. You mentioned Entech,
Bill and pulp and paper.
Ive been in business for
24 years and before that,
worked for EnTech. EnTech was a promoter of
Lambda tuning, not really
a developer.
Ive tuned perhaps 1,000
loops all using the Lambda
method, and have been
surprised in recent years
how a method that is a de
facto standard for our industry for 25
years is not also the standard in other industries. I have seen published articles
written by knowledgeable people, who
seem to be new to Lambda tuning and
have some misunderstandings that may
confuse some readers (e.g. that Lambda
tuning is not well suited to integrating processes like level or that performance was poor when, in fact, incorrect
Lambda tuning rule was applied).
I agree that slow performance is an
issue with the Lambda method for processes with large time constants. Its understood in our industry that such loops
are tuned as near-integrators. Almost all
steam pressure controls are tuned this
way, and Lambda tuning courses are
usually split into first-order, integrating
and near-integrating methods.
Occasionally, the near-integrating
method is not practical. With very large
time constants, I will sometimes replace
the PID with a Modified Smith Predictor, which would typically be superior
to PID tuned by any method. But the
Lambda method for me has been extremely helpful.

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Finalist Jesse H. Neal Award, 2013 and 2016

Jesse H. Neal Award Winner
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WIRELESS AT EAGLE MINE

CONTROL TALK ON ALARMING SITUATIONS

PROBLEMS WITH BACKWARDS COMPATABILITY
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

Dick Caro

Richard@CMC.us

G. Givens, Givens Control Eng.

ggivens@givenscontrol.com

J u l y / 2 0 1 6 www.controlglobal.com

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