Leeds & Northrup Company

Theron W Jenkins, Jr

Justus C Barber

Walter Fishman

A means to change the position of a drive unit in accordance with desired changes periodically provided as a digital value and entered in a first register, which is then decremented to zero by counting actual increments of drive unit change. Power to change the drive unit is proportional to the residual value in this register, with no power when actual change has equalled desired change. The count of actual change increments is determined from clock pulses updating a second register representing position whenever the analog equivalent of this register differs from an analog signal representing actual position.

Digital drive unit regulator

Control of the throttle pressure in a drum boiler-turbine system is accomplished by controlling the rate of fuel feed with a cascade control system. When fuel feed cannot be directly measured, but is computed from boiler output, the controllers in the system are decoupled to prevent their interaction. The primary control responds to throttle pressure deviation to produce a heat release demand signal which is compared to the calculated heat release. A signal produced by summing components of the heat release calculation, namely steam flow and rate of change of drum pressure, is used to cancel out any contribution to the input to the primary controller by changes in throttle pressure resulting from disturbances in the fuel feed, which disturbances will be corrected by the secondary or fuel feed controller.

Decoupled cascade control system

A filter is provided to substantially nullify the effect of process noise of less than a preset amplitude limit on the measurement of a process variable. The filter passes on to a controller or other device all signal changes greater than this amplitude. Within the amplitude limit the signal is damped by a first order lag with a filter time constant typically at least an order of magnitude greater than the average period of the noise to be filtered, but outside the amplitude limit, signal changes are passed immediately with no lag to a device such as a controller. The filter functions by generating a compensating signal essentially duplicating the process noise and then subtracting this compensating signal from the filter input signal, thus canceling this noise from the signal passed to the controller or other device. By subtracting only a limited value of this compensating signal from the filter input, changes of input greater than this limit are not compensated, and are thus immediately passed with no lag. On a sustained change of the input signal, the unlimited compensated signal will decay toward zero at the filter time constant, so that noise centering about the new sustained value of the input will be filtered.

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Ambler, PA, United States of America

Theron W Jenkins, Jr