Review
Not a "cookbook", but an innovative "whole patient" approach to troubleshooting, that views an established process as an organic system. --
A.I.Ch.E. Life-Long Learning Brochure 1998
From the Author
Troubleshooting is presented as a craft distinctive to manufacturing support, rather than a retread of design or conventional process engineering. Creative way are described to inductively achieve root-cause identification of embedded process flaws that can "erupt" to impair operability or product quality. Premature or inappropriate curative action is forestalled by enhancing the problem visualization phase, enlarging the context through metaphor and imagery: "making the strange familar; making the familiar strange.
An established process is viewed as an organic system, in a methodology that treats the "whole patient". Generic problems like "bulges" in distillation, foaming, product quality, are linked to trace chemistry pathways operative beneath the process surface. Modules of fluid mechanics, distillation, reaction, and control, which figure either as elements in problems or as potential aids in their solution, are catalogued.
This book does not provide a "cookbook" set of solutions to specific problems. It is concerned rather with fostering changes in the "culture" of manufacturing support, avoiding jargon, communicating ideas across disciplinary lines, enlisting patience, curiosity, and qualitative imagery and judgments.