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A control loop is the fundamental building block of control systems in general and industrial control systems in particular. It consists of the process sensor, the controller function, and the final control element (FCE) which controls the process necessary to automatically adjust the value of a measured process variable (PV) to equal the value of a desired set-point (SP).
The control system performance can be improved by combining the feedback (or closed-loop) control of a PID controller with feed-forward (or open-loop) control. Knowledge about the system (such as the desired acceleration and inertia) can be fed forward and combined with the PID output to improve the overall system performance.
The definition of a closed loop control system according to the British Standards Institution is "a control system possessing monitoring feedback, the deviation signal formed as a result of this feedback being used to control the action of a final control element in such a way as to tend to reduce the deviation to zero." [2]
In control theory, an open-loop controller, also called a non-feedback controller, is a control loop part of a control system in which the control action ("input" to the system [1]) is independent of the "process output", which is the process variable that is being controlled. [2]
The control action is the switching on/off of the boiler, but the controlled variable should be the building temperature, but is not because this is open-loop control of the boiler, which does not give closed-loop control of the temperature. In closed loop control, the control action from the controller is dependent on the process output.
The system diagram for representing control loops is a Piping and instrumentation diagram. Commonly used control systems include programmable logic controller (PLC), Distributed Control System (DCS) or SCADA. Example of level control system of a continuous stirred-tank reactor. The flow control into the tank would be cascaded off the level control.
Departure of such a variable from its setpoint is one basis for error-controlled regulation using negative feedback for automatic control. [3] A setpoint can be any physical quantity or parameter that a control system seeks to regulate, such as temperature, pressure, flow rate, position, speed, or any other measurable attribute.
In cascade control, one control loop applies control algorithms to a measured variable against a setpoint but then provides a varying setpoint to another control loop rather than affecting process variables directly. If a system has several different measured variables to be controlled, separate control systems will be present for each of them.