Quarter Amplitude Damping | Control Notes 24/06/15

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Quarter-amplitude damping is likely the best-known tuning objective, but its a poor choice for
process stability. Also called quarter amplitude decay or QAD, many tuning rules, including the
famous Ziegler-Nichols and Cohen-Coon tuning rules, were designed for this objective. The
idea behind quarter-amplitude damping is to eliminate any error between the setpoint and Proc ess Control for
process variable very fast. In fact, the controller responds so fast that the process variable Prac titioners
actually overshoots its setpoint and oscillates a few times before it finally comes to rest Jac ques F. Smuts
(Figure 1). The deviation from setpoint gets smaller with each successive cycle at a ratio of Best Pric e $109.95
4:1. In Figure 1, the ratio of B/A = 1/4. or Buy New $109.95

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Presented by Process
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Figure 1. A quarter-amplitude-damping response after a about advanced control
process disturbance. strategies such as
cascade, feedforward, ratio
control, and much more.
When developing their tuning rules, Ziegler and Nichols chose quarter-amplitude damping to
be optimum control loop response. Although QAD performance lies in the middle between a Click here for more
completely dead controller and an unstable control loop, you should realize that quarter- information and to register.
amplitude damping, by design, causes the process to overshoot its set point and to oscillate
around it a few times before eventually settling down. Practitioners with solid experience in
controller tuning will all tell you that quarter-amplitude-damping is a very poor choice for tuning
industrial control loops.Problems with Quarter-Amplitude Damping
Although the quarter-amplitude damping tuning objective provides very fast rejection of
disturbances, it creates three problems:

1. It makes the loop very oscillatory, often causing interactions with similarly tuned loops.
If control loops in a highly interactive process, such as a paper machine, power plant
boiler, or hydrodealkylation process, are tuned for quarter-amplitude damping,
oscillations affecting the entire process often occur.
2. It causes a loop to overshoot its setpoint when recovering from a process disturbance
and after a setpoint change. Many processes cannot tolerate overshoot.
3. QAD-tuned loops are not very stable and have low robustness. They can very easily
become completely unstable if the process characteristics change. For example, such a
loop will become unstable if its process gain doubles, which can happen very easily
in industrial processes.

Solution
An easy way to minimize all three problems is to reduce the controller gain (detune the
controller). The minimum reduction I recommend is to use the calculated Kc divided by two (or
more if necessary). For example, if a quarter-amplitude-damping tuning rule suggests using a
controller gain of 0.9, then use 0.45 instead. This will greatly reduce oscillations and
overshoot in the control loop, and it will increase the loops robustness by a factor of two.
(Please note that if your controller uses a parallel algorithm, you have to reduce Kp, Ki, and Kd
to achieve the equivalent effect).
Stay tuned!
Jacques Smuts
Principal Consultant at OptiControls, and author of Process Control for Practitioners.

Posted in 1. General, 4. Controller Tuning

One Response to Quarter Amplitude Damping

Don Parker:
October 8, 2013 at 5:11 pm
Jacques,
I have worked with boiler/turbine controls for many years and could not agree more. So
many of the processes are interactive that they must be tuned wthout oscillation,
generally with maximum overshoot of about 5%.
Of course there is also the problem of over-active actuators, which can cause
http://blog.opticontrols.com/archives/1066 1/2
Quarter Amplitude Damping | Control Notes 24/06/15
premature aging, wear, linkage hysteresis, etc.
I have found Lambda tuning to be a very successful method for many power plant
control loops.

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