Improving Actuator Wearing Using Noise Filtering.

Actuator, mostly valve, wearing is an important factor of the overall industrial control system operational cost. Actuator operational wear strongly depends on its operation. Highly utilized elements have a tendency to degrade faster. Therefore, the maintenance teams prefer to minimize their moves. In contrary, control engineers need the actuators to actively operate in their control loops to mitigate disturbances and follow the desired trajectories. Higher control performance is often achieved with an active use of actuators. Control loop quality depends on the controller setup and loop auxiliary functionality. Properly designed filtering not only facilitates controller action, but also impacts actuator operational wear. Industrial control templates are built using the blockware that is embedded in the existing control system. Distributed control system (DCS) and programmable logic controller (PLC) have a limited number of control algorithms. An engineer has to design the control structure and the associated sensor noise filtering using available functionality. This paper evaluates and measures the impact of noise filtering on the loop performance and on the actuator weariness. Relations between noise filtering time constant, loop performance and valve travel deliver recommendations for control engineers.

Digital Twins in the Practice of High-Energy Physics Experiments: A Gas System for the Multipurpose Detector.

The digital twins technology delivers a new degree of freedom into system implementation and maintenance practice. Using this approach, a technological system can be efficiently modeled and simulated. Furthermore, such a twin offline system can be efficiently used to investigate real system issues and improvement opportunities, e.g., improvement of the existing control system or development of a new one. This work describes the development of a control system using the digital twins methodology for a gas system delivering a specific mixture of gases to the time-of-flight (ToF) multipurpose detector (MPD) used during high-energy physics experiments in the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna, Russia). The gas system digital twin was built using a test stand and further extended into target full-scale installation planned to be built in the near future. Therefore, conducted simulations are used to validate the existing system and to allow validation of the planned new system. Moreover, the gas system digital twin enables testing of new control opportunities, improving the operation of the target gas system.

Control quality assessment using fractal persistence measures.

Control Performance Assessment (CPA) has great practical importance. Control quality significantly affects final production throughput, efficiency and environmental impact. There are many approaches starting from time-domain methods, through Minimum Variance, Gaussian and non-Gaussian statistics up to alternative wavelet, fractal or entropy measures. Analysis of production data from process industry shows that signals are often described by non-Gaussian distributions, mostly fat-tail. On the other hand, simulations show that strong disturbances may significantly screen ability of proper detection. This work tests different approaches, i.e. Gaussian standard deviation and fat-tail distribution factors, integral indexes and focuses on persistence measures of rescaled range R/S plot. Robustness of above measures against disturbances with varying statistical properties is investigated. Results confirm that fractal measures may be applied as robust alternative to standard statistics.

Non-Gaussian and persistence measures for control loop quality assessment.

This paper presents review and comparison of alternative methodologies for control performance assessment. The approach uses nonlinear time series analysis, such as non-Gaussian statistics, fractal, crossover analysis, or entropy-based approaches. There is a presented practical rationale for the analysis. Evaluation is based on the real data gathered from industrial systems. Non-Gaussian analysis starts with statistical methods using different probabilistic distribution functions. As another potential measure, the Hurst exponent is calculated using different approaches. Finally, R/S plot analysis together with crossover point phenomenon discussion is presented. The paper ends with conclusions and presentation of open issues attractive for further development.