Disturbing Remarks

The Memories of Loops Gone Bad and Processes Gone Wild

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Greg McMillan and Stan WeinerBy Greg McMillan and Stan Weiner, PE

Greg: Do you remember going into a control room and noticing right away something was wrong—such as the uneaten doughnuts or the food burning in the kitchen?

Stan: You knew it was bad if the operators were too busy to enjoy the finer things of control room life.

Greg: Oh, the memories of loops gone bad and processes gone wild! Fortunately, we’re getting good at forgetting. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah, how to deal with a gyrating plant. The first step is to tune the loops, but without the loop monitoring and learning tools, you have to wait until things calm down to do some step testing if the operator is fighting just to keep the plant running or the batch going.

Stan: You can check for bizarre tuning settings without interfering with the operator. The reset time setting is often too small on columns, stills, reactors, crystallizers and surge tanks. These unit operations are integrating processes or behave like integrating processes. Because of a process time constant so much larger than the loop dead time, the process response looks like a ramp in the time frame of interest. You can frequently get these loops to settle down by simply increasing the reset time by a factor of 10. If there were a bunch of oscillating loops, the root cause is often the loop furthest upstream. By far the most frequent bad actor is a level loop on a surge tank. Here the reset time is typically 100 times too small, causing slow rolling oscillations that ripple through the plant. Really bad news is a disturbance upstream with a period of oscillation close to the period of a loop, because the result is resonance where the oscillations get in phase and amplified by the loop.


Greg: Another common source of oscillations is a valve with excessive stick-slip (resolution limit) and backlash (dead band). It’s a valve instead of a tuning problem if the oscillations have a constant amplitude and period for a given reset and gain setting. Such limit cycles are mostly caused by valves, provided the controller is not banging between its output limits or the flat portions of a titration curve. Stick-slip causes loops with reset action to oscillate regardless of tuning settings. For stick-slip, the amplitude of the oscillations is relatively constant, but the period increases as the reset time increases and the controller gain decreases. Dead band causes a similar problem for a loop with double integration (integral time setting for an integrating process or integral time settings in both controllers of a cascade loop). For dead band, the amplitude in the process variable oscillation is inversely proportional to the controller gain. The period of a dead band oscillation is proportional to the reset time, like stick-slip, but the inverse relationship to controller gain is weaker.

Stan: A particularly confusing situation is when the reset action of a primary loop is faster than the reset action of a secondary loop, or when the reset action of any loop is faster than the slewing rate of a control valve or the velocity limit of a variable-speed drive. The loop looks fine for normal operation, but goes unstable for large load upsets or big set-point changes. The dynamic reset limiting option available today in a DCS can prevent the problem of the controller output outrunning its manipulated variable.

Greg: If a periodic disturbance is faster than the loop, the best a feedback controller can do is nothing. By the time it does something, it’s too late or puts the loop at risk for resonance. Really fast disturbances are better known as noise. Signal filters can make a measurement appear to be smoother and reduce the reaction of the loop, but the correct solution is to get rid of the disturbance. If this isn’t possible, the next best thing is to slow down or attenuate the disturbance and speed up the loop by getting rid of loop dead time and using a higher controller gain setting. The biggest source of dead time is often the time it takes for the controller to work its way through stick-slip or dead band. A high controller gain reduces this dead time.

Stan: Tuning and valve problems start out as flow disturbances, but can become concentration, pressure or temperature disturbances as they work their way through the process. Batch operations, start-ups, shutdowns, operator actions, interlocks, discrete process actions and level switches can cause big, abrupt and disruptive changes in flows.

Greg: The best way to slow down and reduce the amplitude of a concentration disturbance is to take advantage of a back-mixed volume between the disturbance and the loop. The mixing can be caused by turbulence from agitation, boiling or recirculation. The attenuation (reduction in amplitude) is proportional to the period of the concentration disturbance divided by the residence time of the volume (liquid inventory divided by total feed flow).

Stan: The largest unknown source of concentration disturbances is the raw materials. The culprit could be a change in the concentration of a key reactant or a contaminant that degrades process operation. Unfortunately, the composition of these raw materials may not even be measured in the lab. Furthermore, feed tanks usually don’t have agitators, so the only smoothing from the unloading of tank cars is from flow-entry turbulence and the slow migration of components from areas of high-to-low concentration.

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