Top 5 Control Engineering articles, May 4-10: Feed forwards augmenting PID control, pigging your line, age of the control engineer, more

Articles about feed forwards augmenting PID control, pigging your line, using a historian to store machine data, the age of the control engineer, and soft starters were Control Engineering’s five most clicked articles from last week, May 4-10. Miss something? You can catch up here.

By Chris Vavra May 11, 2015

Control Engineering Top 5 most read articles online, for May 4-10, covered feed forwards augmenting PID control, pigging your line, using a historian to store machine data, the age of the control engineer, and soft starters. Link to each article below.

1. Feed forwards augment PID control

Feed forward augmentation is a prediction technique that estimates the output from a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control algorithm without waiting for the PID algorithm to respond. 

2. Dirty pipelines decrease flow, production—pig your line

Allen Pennington, president of Pigs Unlimited International located in Tomball, Texas, shared his industry insights about the challenges related to pipeline cleaning. 

3. Using a historian to store machine data

Integration of historians with human-machine interface software allows knowledge workers to change the future based on past collection of big data. Here’s the why and how of linking your machine HMI to a historian, and the best ways to view and analyze historical data. 

4. ‘The age of the control engineer is just dawning’

Dr. Peter Martin of Schneider Electric talked about opportunities to apply control engineering skills beyond efficiency at the Schneider Electric Global Automation Conference. 

5. Soft starters: The modern solution for every girth gear drive

Soft starters replace old mechanical solutions such as star-delta or autotransformers and are gaining market share in the electrical drive field, previously dominated by variable frequency drives. 

The list was developed using CFE Media’s web analytics for stories viewed on controleng.com, May 4-10, for articles published within the last two months.

– Chris Vavra, production editor, CFE Media, cvavra@cfemedia.com.