Tuning Practice 3 — Level — VFD pump on the inlet

The job

What you are looking at

This tank has no control valve. The controller output goes straight to a variable-frequency drive as a speed reference for the fill pump. Faster pump, more flow in. The outflow drawn off the bottom is the load.

The drive and controller are newly installed and the controller is on factory defaults. The acting direction has not been commissioned.

This is practice, not a test. Nothing on this page is scored and nothing is submitted anywhere. Judge your tuning by the trend in front of you: how quickly the measurement reaches the setpoint, how far past it goes, whether it settles, and how the loop behaves when the load changes. Change something, watch it, change it again.

How to work through it

Steps

Press Start. The loop begins balanced at setpoint, so nothing will move until you disturb it — move the setpoint, or change the load, and watch which way the measurement goes.
Decide which way the controller has to act when its output is a pump speed rather than a valve position, and set it.
Tune the controller until the level holds steadily at setpoint.
Drag the Outflow slider to change the load and watch the recovery. Adjust and repeat until you are satisfied.
Before you call it tuned, change the load and confirm the loop brings the measurement back and holds it. A loop that only looks good on a setpoint move is not proven.

This loop is tuned with the proportional and integral terms. The derivative term is fixed at zero here.

Adjustment range available for each tuning term on this exercise
Tuning term	Lowest	Highest
Proportional gain (Kp)	0	10
Integral gain (Ki, 1/s)	0	0.65

These ranges are set for this loop only. Another exercise will have different ones, because a different process needs different numbers.

Simulator

For your own record

Commissioning notes

Nothing here is graded or sent anywhere. Write down what you settled on and why, so you have it to compare against the next exercise.

Which way did this controller have to act, and how did you work that out? What did you leave the tuning set to? Record the numbers themselves, in whichever form the controller was showing them. What did the loop do when you changed the load, and were you satisfied with the recovery?

Your notes stay in this browser, on this computer, and they belong to this exercise alone — each exercise keeps its own set. Open this exercise again on this computer and they will be here waiting for you. They are not sent anywhere and they are not graded, and they will not follow you to another machine, so copy anything you want to keep elsewhere.