Performance Evaluation of ISA100.11a Wireless Feedback Control

:Nowadays, wireless communication is a tendency in industrial environments, saving resources and enabling the addition of new applications when compared to their wired counterparts. In this context, the ISA100.11a specification is emerging as a solution for the last mile connection. Despite its high degree of applicability, due to the nature of its technical challenges (reliability, energy consumption, fault tolerance, ensuring constant delays) an ISA100.11a network is used, in the majority of applications, for monitoring processes. Given the aforementioned and considering the lack of commercial wireless actuators, the demand for evaluation and assured reliability tools on the control loops is imminent. Aiming to demystify the use of wireless technology on the control loops in the industry, this paper presents a practical experiment of evaluation that enables the analysis of the behavior of an ISA100.11a network in process control by controlling the level of water in a system of coupled tanks, part of a Quanser's educational kit.