Incatools blog

Leading specialty chemicals company, Lanxess Belgium, noticed the plant wasn’t working at its full potential. Many controllers were underperforming and in manual mode. Due to lack of time, the control engineers ran aground to complete optimization. Read in this blog what benefits they gained by using the INCATools software, or download the case study to discover the process and results.

When PID tuning is done right, it can provide significant benefits to your plant. A little help from PID tuning software can help tremendously to get your tuning on track. You can find many free PID tuning software downloads on the internet, or you can find a free PID tuner in your DCS. Nevertheless, are numerous companies that provide PID software licences at a fair price. But, why would you pay for a PID tuning software licence when you can do somewhat the same with the free versions? 

The answer is simple, the most critical PID loops in your plant will get left behind when you use free PID tuning software. The freeware will stand in the way of optimization and receiving the full ROI of your plant.

The principle of PID is very simple. Three subsets (P, I, D) of one equation that each have their own task. Nevertheless, the PID formula in your DCS/PLC can have many forms. The most common equations are the series and parallel equation. In this blog we'll show you that it's extremely important to know the different formulas to tune your controller. 

What if you could increase your return on investment, safety, and overall plant efficiency with just one optimization? Furnace control is often disregarded as furnaces are considered as subunits that are not important to optimize. However, one cannot underestimate the impact of the furnace performance on the overall unit. In this blog, we'll explain what the consequences of bad furnace control are, what the results of optimization will be and how to tune your furnace correctly.

Bringing PID control performance to the highest level is a challenge, but keeping the performance high is a different game. In this blog, you’ll read reasons for degrading PID control performance and the various ways in which our customers take on the challenge of sustaining control performance monitoring. You’ll also read what to expect from the webinar “PID sustained control performance”: how to get to a high control performance monitoring and how to keep the performance up, including some practical cases.

For FrieslandCampina, improving work processes on plant sites is an ongoing course of action. Therefore, it’s fundamental to be aware of possible shortcomings and growth potential of these processes. They decided to implement INCATools PID tuner, a tool that matched the technical criteria and scored high on usability because of the integrated roadmap. Read in this blog why FrieslandCampina needed to change course and what benefits the software offered.

It’s no secret that well-tuned PID loops contribute to a stable and healthy plant. Once optimally tuned, only critical PID loops that cause too many alarms tend to be tuned again. Underperforming loops are often ignored. But if you frequently analyze all your PID loops you can enhance total efficiency, have less wear and tear, more overall stability, and fewer operator interventions. Read in this blog why it is essential to monitor your PID’s and how to perform monitoring most cost-effectively.

More than a hundred years ago, Sperry Corporation invented automatic pilot control in airplanes. It was magical and scary at the same time. Nowadays, they can anticipate the exact arrival time, other planes nearby, and the weather forecast. It became unimaginable that our planes would fly without it. APC is the automatic pilot in plants. APC projects can maximize your performance and plant's profit. For decades, the chemical process industry has been working with it. It can benefit smaller plants considerably as well. However, proper PID tuning is the first step in an APC project. It is the foundation for your automatic plant pilot, learn in this blog why.

It's no secret that proper PID tuning will contribute to a stable plant with fewer variations and fluctuations. Optimal and stable operations are the ultimate goal. This can result in several percentages of extra throughput and several percentages reduction of specific energy consumption. Additional throughput is highly desired in high market conditions, while the specific energy consumption might be more interesting when selling prices are low and energy prices high. In all cases, more stability results in fewer alarms and fewer operator interventions.
In this blog, you will learn why PID tuning improves process performance and how to accomplish this technical result of PID tuning.

At most plants, the biggest challenge in tuning PID controllers is to reject process disturbances. However, in many PID controller’s information regarding process disturbances is missing in the PID algorithms which drastically affects PID performance. Do you need to understand how to add that information in PID controllers? Check out this blog, about the benefits in feedforward in PID controllers.