Educational Foundation Fieldbus Pilot Plant

Abstract

The paper presents a pilot plant built to demonstrate the principles of process control using the FoundationFieldbus (FF) technology. Some theoretical background is given by explaining the logical layers of the technology,namely the physical layer, the communication stack and the user layer. Practical aspects, like the configuration ofinstruments, the design of a control strategy and the development of supervision software, are also covered by means of an application example. The example runs on the pilot plant making use of pressure, level and flow control loops,quantities widely found in the process industry. Experimental results are extracted and analyzed in order to evaluatethe overall performance of the system.