All You Need To Know About PID Controller - Eurotherm 3208

Posted by michaelalbert on February 8th, 2017

A PID controller also known as temperature controller is an instrument used to control temperature. It takes an input from a respective temperature sensor and produces an output that is connected to a control element like a heater or fan. 

In order to control the process temperature without any extensive involvement of operator, a temperature control system apparently relies upon a controller that has been designed to accept a temperature sensor such as a thermocouple or RTD as input. A PID controller compares the actual temperature to the desired control temperature, or set point and provides an output to a control element.

How does It Work?

With the use of low cost simple ON-OFF controller only two control states are possible, like fully ON or fully OFF. It is used for limited control application where these two control states are enough for control objective. However, oscillating nature of this control limits its usage and hence it is being replaced by PID controllers.
A PID controller, commonly known as a three term controller reads the sensor signal, normally from a thermocouple or RTD, and converts the measurement to engineering units like degrees Celsius. Controller then subtracts the measurement from a desired set point to determine an error. It maintains the output in such a way that there is zero error between process variable and set point or desired output by closed loop operations. Noise is a major stumbling block for Derivative and PID Control as production data is routinely replete with process noise and other sources of variability. The use of PID Control in such an environment can drive frenetic changes in a loop’s Controller Output (CO) and unnecessarily wear out the associated Final Control Element (FCE)

PID Applications: 
A renowned PID controller like Eurotherm 3208 offers precision control of temperature and other process variables in entirety. 

The Eurotherm 2416 is a versatile, high stability, temperature or process controller, with self and adaptive tuning ideal for chemical applications plastics and heat treatment, single and multi-zone furnaces, glass furnaces etc.

Other equipment like Eurotherm 2216e is configurable for heating, cooling or alarms. You can configure this unit on-site as well. 

There are numerous industrial applications where PID Control shines. While processes with fast dynamics and excessive noise undermine the efficacy of the derivative term, not all processes exhibit these characteristics. With those slower, less noisy processes derivative contributes effectively to the correction of error.

Author’s Bio: Author is an online blogger. The article is about PTD controllers such as Eurotherm 3208.