Overview of Process Control

National Instruments has a strong presence in the process control world - from developing a small monitoring system for brewing beer in Texas, to managing an entire city's water supply in Louisiana, to monitoring and controlling a power plant in Hungary.

Programmable automation controllers, such as Compact FieldPoint from National Instruments deliver unmatched analog process control, signal processing, and data logging capabilities in a rugged environment. With data acquisition and signal conditioning hardware for PCI and PXI platforms, you can monitor and control valves, actuators, and sensors on the plant floor. With various networking options such as Ethernet, Fieldbus, and Profibus, you can connect National Instruments hardware as a part of any large scale monitoring and control system. National Instruments offers PC-based interfaces, fieldbus linking devices, distributed I/O, and configuration/diagnostics software, as well as starter kits for FOUNDATION Fieldbus. Through OPC connectivity, you can connect devices from various vendors such as Allen-Bradley, Applicom, GE Fanuc, Koyo, Mitsubishi, Omron, Optomux and many more.

Let National Instruments help you improve your process control experience. We have multiple options to ensure your success.

• Build a system
• Find an integrator

Plastic Injection Molding

Manufacturers use thermoplastics to make a large array of products in industries from automotive and telecom to food packaging and toys. In this manufacturing process, pellets of thermoplastic material are mixed and carefully heated under PID control. The melted plastic slurry is then injected into a mold and cooled to form the plastic product. Careful monitoring and control are required to obtain high yields. Learn how you can configure your plastic injection molding application with NI software and hardware.

Configure Your Plastic Injection Molding Application with NI Hardware and Software

pH Control

Most process plants generate a wastewater effluent that must be neutralized prior to discharge or reuse. Consequently, pH control is needed in just about every process plant, and yet a large percentage of pH loops perform poorly. Results are inferior product quality, environmental pollution, and material waste. With ever-increasing pressure to improve plant efficiency and tighter regulations in environmental protection, effective and continuous pH control is highly desirable. Learn how leveraging National Instruments LabVIEW Real-Time development environment, an embedded MFA pH controller can run on the PC, PXI or Compact FieldPoint platforms.

Configure Your pH Control Application with NI Hardware and Software

Nonlinear Control

Conventional controllers such as PID and many advanced control methods are useful to control linear processes. In practice, most processes are nonlinear. If a process is severely nonlinear, it can be extremely difficult to control. Learn how you can develop a Model-Free Adaptive (MFA) control solution for controlling severely nonlinear processes without having to build process models and retune controller parameters.

Configure Your Nonlinear Control Application with NI Hardware and Software