When trying to accurately control a process such as temperature, tension, level or other analog control,

PID control is one of the best ways to do so. The FP Sigma has a very accurate PID algorithm built in. It
uses floating point math internally for extreme accuracy. All you have to do is set values in the data
registers and use the F355 PID instruction. Please see the sample program at the bottom of the page.

PID and IPD

The FP Sigma features PID and I-PD control while most PLCs have only PID control. The difference
between the two types of control is that the PID tends to respond quickly and overshoot, whereas the I-PD
algorithm has a slower response and does not overshoot. If your process is not fast and you want to have
accurate control, I-PD is the most practical approach. From our experiences, more than 90% of the time I-
PD works better than PID to control temperature.

You can also combine PID and I-PD to obtain fast acting response and smoother ending.

Autotuning

In order to control PID or I-PD, you must have three parameters (Proportional gain, Integral time,
Derivative time). These parameters are dependent on the process being controlled. Only experienced
process engineers may be able to accurately estimate the PID parameters. However, with our Auto-Tuning
function, the values for these three parameters are automatically extrapolated by performing a trial run on
the process. There is no intervention required by the user.

Autotuning
There are not many compact PLCs that have floating point math operations.

Without floating point math 1/3 x 100=0, but with floating point: 1/3 x 100=33.3333

The above calculations demonstrate the importance of floating point math. Another major concern is that
small controllers will experience a very long scan time whenever many floating point functions are used.
This does not apply to the FP Sigma. It uses a super high speed RISC processor which allows it to
maintain a short scan time.

Mixing Floating Point and Integer

Our FP series PLC allows the use of mixed mathematical formats (floating point and integer) in the same
formula. This is also true for mixing 16 bit and 32 bit integer. The example below shows a floating point
data division function. The "%" symbol in front of DT20 indicates that the result of the floating point division
will be converted to an integer. No symbol would be necessary if all the data were to remain as floating
point numbers.

DT100 (floating point data) is divided by a floating point constant 150.3 and stored in DT20 as 16 bit
integer data.