Enhancing process performance through automatic control

The proportional integral derivative (PID) controller is the most dominant form of automatic controller in industrial use today. With this technique, it is necessary to adjust the controller parameters according to the nature of the process. Thus, for effective control of a pasteurisation process, for example, specific values need to be chosen for the P, I and D parameters, which will be different for the values required to control, for example, a distillation column. This tailoring of controller to process is known as controller tuning