Pneumatic Actuator Portable Analyzer1

Abstract

Most of all automation industries especially power plant has experienced various common problems of the pneumatic control valve such as the valve is unable to fully open or close, some issues on partially open or close condition. These common problems always give bad impact to the industrial businesses such as unnecessary process/system disturbances and the nastiest situation is plant tripping. It is usually caused by the under-performance of pneumatic air pressure, valve mechanically jammed, quality of the internal sealed, malfunction of instrumentation's parts such as control solenoid, and etc. The idea of this project is to design and develop a Pneumatic Actuator Portable Analyzer. This project is a combination of software programs and the electronics interfacing hardware works. This project only being used when the system occur an error during operation. This project consist of pressure sensor, differential pressure and flow switch. But in this project, it use a variable resistor as replacement for the sensor. This is to create the real environment of the site that this product is used. The variable resistor is connected to PIC 18F46K80. This PIC will analyze the condition of the variable resistors (represent the sensors) and the PIC will process the data. The output can be obtained from the databased that being programmed on the PIC. This project have 2 operating mode, mode 1 is for open condition and mode 2 is for close condition. The device will display the reading on the LCD that being placed on the device. Based on the difficulty of troubleshooting level, hence the single acting actuating cylinder type is selected to become a test project.