PLC process control
Have you ever wondered how measurement devices such as thermostats work? How does the thermostat measure the room temperature and then make the necessary changes so that your furnace or air conditioner suddenly turns on or off? This would seem to be an almost magical process. Thanks to brilliant engineers working for years we now have what are known as programmable logic controllers (PLC) that measure and adjust machines, and many different types of machines. Beyond your PLC thermostat there are very important applications for a PLC in manufacturing. As you can imagine, there are several complicated processes that use a PLC to monitor and change the way that they work. Think about a manufacturing process, for example, that requires some sort of raw material input. If the inputs came to frequently or not frequently enough the process can encounter serious problems. Things at both the input and output end of the production line need to be closely monitored in connection with each other.
DCS Process control
Have you ever wondered how complex industrial or electrical systems are monitored? Take, for example, something like a chemical manufacturing plant. How does one part of a system know that another part has completed its assigned task? Is there some central brain that controls all of the processes at once? These sorts of systems seem almost too complex for most of us to investigate or figure out. It does actually take engineers years of training to design complex process control systems. Some work according to a single programmable system control that takes in information and makes changes according to a set of logical systems. By this means a complex manufacturing process can be controlled and changed according to certain needs of the situation. However, these sorts of programmable logical control devices are extremely important for simple manufacturing, but there are other processes that require a more complicated system. For example, systems that have many different processes going on at once need several different controllers. They may need a different controller for each one of the processes and each one of those controllers would also need to communicate with each other because they have to funciton in order.
