BRAZILIAN JOURNAL OF INSTRUMENTATION AND CONTROL

Abstract—The paper presents a pilot plant built to demonstrate the principles of process control using the Foundation Fieldbus (FF) technology. Some theoretical background is given by explaining the logical layers of the technology, namely the physical layer, the communication stack and the user layer. Practical aspects, like the configuration of instruments, the design of a control strategy and the development of supervision software, are also covered by means of an application example. The example runs on the pilot plant making use of pressure, level and flow control loops, quantities widely found in the process industry. Experimental results are extracted and analyzed in order to evaluate the overall performance of the system. Index Terms—Foundation Fieldbus, fieldbus control systems, process control, engineering education, pilot plant I