The period before a plant’s launch is a stressful time. There is a possibility you will face mechanical problems, errors in the instrumentation and DCS configurations, safety issues and even last minute changes in control designs.
When a plant is commissioned, all the equipment and all safety and control systems are tested. However, this doesn’t mean that, at this stage, the plant is tuned to generate the most optimal results. In this blog, you will read why it’s important to start with PID tuning in a plant’s commissioning phase.
PID tuning is a game-changer
Optimal PID tuning is finding the ideal set of parameters efficiently to achieve the desired closed-loop control. PID controllers provide the basic stability to your plant by automatically keeping flows, pressures, temperatures, etc. at an operator-entered setpoint. Correctly tuned loops result in fewer operator interventions and fewer alarms.
When done right, PID tuning is a game-changer. However, the responsibility of the EPC company, when starting up a plant, doesn’t entail efficiently tuning of PID loops. This means the PID loops are often set to manual mode, to some default settings or even badly tuned.
The benefits of robust plant performance
It’s likely you will face many issues after the plant’s startup. To reduce those problems in the long run, professional PID tuning is needed to lay the foundation for the best and most efficient plant performance. In our opinion, it’s time for the DCS engineer to make every effort to reduce alarms and provide as much plant efficiency as possible after commissioning the plant. How faster the loops are tuned correctly the more robust the plant is to compensate any alarms. This will result in many benefits:
- A faster start-up for the plant
- A faster and more efficient production process (fewer sit-downs)
- The ability to stay at full capacity
- The possibility of optimizing the plant in the future
- Reducing the time to get to performance and acceptance testing
- Reducing the load on operators
- Improved plant reliability
Model-based tuning results in the most optimal plant performance
- How PID tuning helps you to reduce alarms and manual operations
- How the right tools enable a first-time-right approach
- The benefits of using the tuning software from INCATools.
Do you like to know what INCATools PID tuning software can offer you?
Request your demo here.
