An audit of process control accuracy at a client facility led to the work stoppage of more than three quarters of available test fixtures due to faulty control software. Since the original authors of the temperature control code were no longer available, our client sought our help to bring their production back online.
DMC stepped in and enabled its priority pipeline to funnel engineers from across the company and country to quickly analyze, document, and diagnose existing temperature control code. The first step the engineering team took was to create a list of opportunities for codebase improvement for the client to review. These improvements were focused on time to deployment, with an emphasis on system architecture preservation and minimum disturbance to ongoing production tests.
DMC delivered a solution that addressed fundamental issues in thermocouple reading and furnace PID control calculations as well as parallelization and independence of test fixture control. PID control was redeveloped for faster cycle times and smoother temperature trajectories. By solving these issues, temperature control accuracy was improved by 2000%, from an average swing of 60 degrees to 3 degrees over a 24-hour period. By implementing a custom PID gain scheduling algorithm developed by our certified LabVIEW developers in tandem with NI PID control VIs, DMC was able to decrease the unit test time by 1500% without negative consequences to test subjects. We were also able to supply the client with critical operating system updates for their legacy hardware.
Engineers traveled to the client site to aid in tuning, testing, validation, and deployment of the upgraded codebase. After validating the improved control, DMC empowered the client to perform system upgrades independently with rapid deployment tools and detailed documentation. This allowed the client’s engineering team to regain familiarity and confidence in the production system while spending less of their budget on external engineering hours. Within two weeks of upgrade validation, the client had recommissioned all 100 test frames at their site successfully.
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