This paper describes a process control course at Taylor Instrument Pty. Ltd., Melbourne, in which industrial process recording and control hardware is interfaced to computer simulated process plant and instrumentation. A number of process plants are provided in simulated form and five work stations are available. Each station has separate independent control over the simulated process it is accessing, and a variety of changes can be made to the simulated process and instrumentation via an interface box. Each work station is also equipped with a conventional three term PID controller, a micro-processor adaptive gain controller and a four pen recorder. It, therefore, becomes possible to investigate the effectiveness of a variety of control strategies on a wide range of problems typical of those encountered in real process plant.
