NeverAmI

Hmm... Seems that you need to start changing those things that you are not willing to in order to not get worked up over them. Or you need to develop a coping strategy so as to deal with these things that need changing until such a time as they can be changed.

I get that. I get that little sensation of panic where all of my senses are heightened and I just get a feeling of dread when people come home. I used to feel that ALL the time. I just like being alone in my house.

I've posted a bit in my blog about the source of my feelings. It's too long to explain. Just reflecting on how much of my life I feel I've missed because of anxiety and fear. I think we talked about it a couple days ago a bit.

What about you?

Thank you, talking with you gave me some inspiration. And thanks for geeking out, I needed that.

That's too bad about feeling down. It kind of throws everything off course. I myself am planning on taking a walk today.

You know what you could do? Just drive your car somewhere nice, roll down the windows and read in your vehicle. You can just listen to the sound of the rain while at the same time be somewhere peaceful, but also warm and dry.

Oh I am a-okay. Have been having a few "off" days so to speak. But I am not terrible. How are you?

The second process would be the boiler itself, and the controlled value would be the temperature of water in it.

valves usually are not considered to be the processes, they are rather simple, but in the example I gave you they are considered as process.

This would be a case of classic cascade control:



Btw, geeking out is fun! :D

OMG, 100 pair! :D That must have really been fun. :D

HVAC is actually really interesting, I wasn't even aware how much until I started working here. But while doing my research I found out that refineries and petrochemical industry has even better devices. I really love the sheer magnitude of those networks and the problems that arise from their everyday work are extremely interesting.

Yup, it really is the same in control engineering. Nothing different. In control engineering problems arise from having something that's physically redundant, like double network topology, and the person who is designated to lay the cables around puts all the cables together. Then some workers come and by accident cut of both cables and there is no system any more, let alone redundancy. This actually happened, I couldn't stop laughing when they were telling me about it.

I think it's the same everywhere, the higher you go, the further you are from real technologies, and in the end you become some kind of manager or supervisor while others are having fun with technology like you used to do.

A loop in control engineering if you are talking about closed loop consists of a process to be controlled, in my example one process could be the valve that modulates the steam flow, controller itself and measuring equipment. It's rather simply really.

Here is a schematic of a classic feedback closed loop. The set point or a reference point in it would be desired flow, the controller be in most cases what is called PID controller, the process would be the valve, and you would have some measuring device, that informs you of flow value after the valve. That way if your measuring device is fast you can almost immediately see if you control action is doing what it should be doing or not.

Yea, they use it in the company I'm in now, and a few weeks ago they took me to a tour of their server room. I must admit that IT is a rather interesting topic but I'm not sure how good I'd be practising it, I never even considered trying out for Cisco certificates.

Redundancy is a rather interesting topic really. We studied a lot about and I was in a position to see some of the common mistakes people make while sizing a control system and not taking care of redundancy like they should.

There was an interesting case about it, when some probe that was suposed to go to Mars was made, in order to make the best program for it, they gave the same assignment to two different teams, one from Europe and one from USA. In the end the probe missed Mars by some length because nobody bothered to check if they both used metric system for calculations. It was a huge fail.

Well different authors give several very different definitions about it, but in general it is a case of multiple loops where primary loop dictates how the inner loop will work. In my case it's testing various ways for defining parameters of controllers (mostly PIDs) when you have real life situations where it gets a bit complicated because you are doing it on a process that on-line.

The simplest case of it would be this: you have a boiler with steady running water through it, and you are trying to heat it by a coil with steam. Now to modulate temperature of water that you want you are going to control the flow of steam. There are some presumptions that you have to make for this analysis but essentially this would be a case of cascade control.

I hear that everywhere the pay gets considerably better after completing those certificates. It's really a good thing to have.

Aww, you are a really sweet guy.

"designing two level cascade control in district heating", it's interesting, but I can't seem write to meaningful sentences for the love of god. I've got no idea what has gotten into me.

When are you taking exam for CCNA? Is it hard? To me all that seems like Chinese.

What kind of technical certification?

I'm ill, so I decided to stay at home this whole week and finish my thesis, which is not being done, as you can see, I'm hanging out here. I've got no idea why I'm having such a hard time with it. Also I'll try again to pass for driving licence, but so far I'm driving very lousy, don't know why. So nothing good on my side really

Awww, it's a video of a Siamese cat purring loudly

How's at work? You must be bored out of your mind?

Oh yes, that can be a problem..

*dracula kitty purring*

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpOky9XpGn8&feature=related"]YouTube - Siamese Cat Purr[/ame]

You are a horrible father.

Breast feed him at the aquarium.