Evaluation and Implementation of Advanced Process Control with the compactRIO Material of National Instrument

Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) is very commonly used in many industries and research applications for process control. However a very complex process control may require algorithms and performances beyond the capability of PLC’s, very high-speed or precision controls may also require other solutions. This paper describes recent research conducted to implement advanced process controls with the compactRIO (cRIO) material from National Instruments (decoupling of MIMO process control, steady state feedback, observer, Kalman filter, etc…). The cRIO systems consist of an embedded real-time controller for communication and processing, a Reconfigurable Field Programmable Array (FPGA) and hot-swappable I/O modules. The paper presents experimental results and the ability of the cRIO to treat complex process control.