Customer Reviews

Process Dynamics, Modeling, and Control (Topics in Chemical Engineering)

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This book was the text for my undergraduate control course. It gave me a better background in process control than the other books I purchased to supplement my learning. I highly recommend this book over others such as Marlin.

Ogunnaike and Ray covers subjects such as root locus methods, tunings using frequency methods, and digital control.

Dr. Ogunnaike is also an excellent lecturer, so if you would like to take the course directly from him enroll at the University of Delaware - its well worth it.

I also recommend Essentials of Process Control by William Luyben to provide a good qualitative background in process control.

This book provides an excellent, practical introduction to process control from the view of Chemical Engineers.

The book begins by considering the development of dynamic process models. It covers practical questions such as which state variable (eg. height) should be controlled by which manipulated variable (eg. flowrate) by discussing the physical behaviour of the system, rather than the approach commonly used by control engineers of an electronics background.

The advantage of the book is that it then goes on to discuss tools such as Nyquist diagrams and Bode plots, and how they can be used to characterise a system's behaviour, in a simple and clear manner. It then addresses essential issues such as controller tuning.

Finally, the book briefly introduces advanced control topics, such as Kalman filters and Model based control, in simple terms which would give an interested reader a running start into these fields.

My only regret is that I have lost my personal copy!

This book is designed to be used in a first undergraduate course in Process Dynamics and Control. Most of the examples in the book are taken from the chemical process industries, which makes this text an ideal tool for the chemical engineering student. Additionally all of the necessary mathematical tools are reviewed on the text itself, which also makes this book a complete reference considering the limited mathematical background of many undergraduate engineers.

The book is organized in six parts. Part I (chapters 1 to 2) provides introductory material that gives a practical perspective and motivation. These include examples to illustrate the basic concepts and the importance of process control in industry, practical examples of modern process control schemes, description of control systems hardware, basic measurement and computer data acquisition technology, fundamentals of digital computer and interfacing technologies, and finally a discussion of final control elements, as actuators, , pumps, valves, heaters, etc.

Part II (chapters 3 to 11) analyzes and characterizes the various types of dynamic behavior expected from a process. These include discussion of various representation and approaches for the formulation of dynamic models, with emphasis on how to select the model formulation most appropriated for the problem at hand. Then comes discussions of the fundamental dynamic response of various model types (Processes with time delays, inverse response, and nonlinearities, among others), and fundamentals of process stability analysis and its applications to the models discussed.

Part III (chapters 12 to 13) discusses methods for constructing process models and determining parameters for the models from experimental data. Both theoretical and empirical models are discussed and contrasted, complementing the material on identification methods, with a treatment of parameters estimation. The text provides sufficient examples to illustrate how each method works in practice.

Part IV introduces the treatment of control system design. Part IV-A (chapters 14 to 19) deals with single loop control systems and introduces the basic principles of controller structure and controller tuning methodology, for processes having the various types of process dynamics. Physical examples are used to illustrate the control system design in practical engineering terms. Part IV-B (chapters 20 to 22) introduces control systems for multivariable processes having interactions. Methods of characterizing loop interactions, choosing loop pairing, and designing various types of multivariable controllers are presented and illustrated through physical process examples, providing approaches for control system design that will work adequately for the overwhelming majority of practical multivariable control problems encountered in practice. Part IV-C (chapters 23 to 26) introduces the principles of sampled-data process control. These include modeling and analysis of discrete-time systems, stability analysis tools, and control system design methods for these dynamic systems.

Part V (chapter 27 to 30) provides an overview of important special topics, too advanced for an in-depth coverage by an introductory book. These include Model-predictive control, statistical process control, state estimation, robust control system design, control of spatial profiles (distributed parameter systems), on-line intelligence and computer aided-design of control systems. The last chapter in part V consists of a series of case studies where the reader is led through the steps of control system synthesis for some representative chemical processes and then shown the performance of the processes after employing the controller.

Part VI provides the Appendices, where substantial material is presented to complement the book.

Even though the book is designed for Chemical Engineering students, this text would also be suitable for students in mechanical, nuclear, industrial, and electrical engineering. I am an Industrial Practitioner of Process Measurement & Control who has been working in the Process Industries for more than 16 years as an Automation, Instrumentation, Process Safety and Process Control Engineer. My academic background is in electrical and electronics engineering (I am an Electronic Engineer), not in chemical engineering as might be the case of the usual reader of this book, but working in the Oil & Gas Industry all this time, I have been dealing with Chemical-Process Control issues in a day-to-day basics. I found this book to be a very useful reference and refresher to gain a better understanding of Modern Process Control Applications.

If you are a practitioner of Process Control you may want to consider also "Instrument Engineers' Handbook, Fourth Edition, Volume Two: Process Control and optimization" by Bela Liptak, for its practical and comprehensive coverage of Process Control.

This book can serve as a good reference, supplement or course textbook for chemical, electrical, mechanical, or industrial engineers. The presentation of the material is coherent, practical and thorough. I frequently referred to the example problems from this book while teaching Chemical and Bio Process Control and Dynamics to Chemical Engineers. Here is the general flow of topics in the text:

Part I introduces central concepts in the field; control and manipulated variables, control elements, feedback, control system design as well as control implementation topics such as digital computer architecture and data acquisition.

Part II introduces dynamic systems; first, second and high order system dynamics, linear and nonlinear dynamics, time delay, frequency response analysis, and system stability.

Part III introduces process modeling; both theoretical and empirical methods.

Part IV (a) introduces single loop dynamics; feedback control systems, controller tuning and design, systems with complex dynamics; (b) discusses multivariable process control; multivariable controller design, dynamic analysis in state space, loop pairing, decoupling; (c) computer process control: discrete-time system dynamics and analysis, design of digital controllers.

Part V discusses advances control topics including model predictive control, statistical process control and several selected topics of interest in the field.