Wireless Control Foundation: Continuous and Discrete Control for the Process Industry

In this book, the authors address the wireless communication concepts and terminology that are needed to apply wireless control in the process industry. The control system interfaces and wireless field devices described in this book are based on wireless standards for industrial settings and can be used in monitoring and control applications. Wireless transmitters were initially used only to monitor the process, not control it. However, over the last six years, wireless measurements have earned high user confidence, and new control techniques have been devised to deal with the characteristics of wireless operation. Based on the broad acceptance of wireless transmitters, many manufacturers are in the process of developing and introducing wireless final control elements such as on/off and throttling valves. The book details the recent technical innovations that address control using wireless measurements and final control elements. It presents how control can be structured to manage the slow and non-periodic measurement update rates provided by a wireless transmitter and to compensate for communication delay to the final control element. These new control techniques make it possible to use wireless measurements and wireless valves in closed loop control. The book also presents how wireless measurements may be utilized with model predictive control (MPC).