Study and Implementation of Smart Positioner Prototype for Industrial Applications

Control valves are an increasingly vital component of modern manufacturing around the world, since control valves are mechanical devices, their performance is less than ideal, and degrades over time. For a plant to perform optimally control valve performance must be tracked and maintained. Industrial positioner systems are often costly to install and maintain, with complex control systems that can be challenging to design and troubleshoot. Pneumatic valves Positioner typically are very simple and do not implement integral control. In this project a novel low cost Smart Positioner is designed and developed to improve the performance of control loops. A new, cost-effective, and easily controllable system is required to meet these needs. This paper proposes a smart embedded-based positioner system built with the STM32 MCU and FreeRTOS operating system. Supporting multiple communication protocols such as UART, I2C, SPI, and Bluetooth through which the system can be seamlessly integrated into existing industrial control systems. The system’s hardware design includes sensors, actuators, and communication modules, along with a rotary encoder to read the angle accurately and is used to give feedback signals to the controller of the current position of the control valve. A specially designed smart embedded control system which is cascade in nature increases the performance of the control system and the performance metrics such as Rise time, settling time and Steady state errors evaluated found improved after implementing smart Positioner. The low-cost smart Positioner uses a cortex M4 microcontroller and open IDE for building the software to run the proposed system.