(494h) Teaching Process Safety and Control through a Real-Time Approach to Industrial Settings

Despite the significant benefits that society has gained from process control technology and the continued vitality of control science as a research field, the academic research community and the practitioners of process control in the industry are insufficiently connected to each other [1]. Developing an engaging process safety course at the university level should not rely only on material obtained from textbooks, but also on the hands-on experience that the instructors have obtained from the industry and real production plants. A good process control is synonymous with good chemical engineering and this relation should be demonstrated through actual case studies that the instructors have experienced in industrial settings.

For decades, the subject of control theory has been taught using transfer functions, frequency-domain analysis and Laplace transform mathematics. This approach is proper for linear systems. However, in the control of chemical processes, which are often characterized by nonlinearity and large doses of dead time, classical control techniques have some limitations. As a consequence, the chemical engineering students do not need the detailed theory and mathematics that usually surround the teaching of process control, such as frequency domain analysis. Instead, they need a base level of understanding of differential equations, as well as comprehension of process dynamics, dynamic modeling of the main unit operations in the time domain, basic control algorithms and cascade structures that are often encountered in the industry. With these basic tools and the perception of how to apply them, the chemical engineers can solve most of the control problems themselves.

The basis of this study is to provide a practical, hands-on introduction to the topics of process control by using only time-based representations of processes and the associated instrumentation and control. In the past four years, a process control and safety course has been developed that is based on fifteen (15) years of practical experience of the instructor from the industry, considering the aforementioned needs of the chemical engineering students to understand process control in real-time environments. The course considers the investigation of processes initially in the Laplace domain in order for the students to understand and master classical process control techniques. Subsequently, the study of the same processes in the time domain is carried out, thus connecting the students with the respective equations and techniques employed in the industry, focusing on introducing the very important and often overlooked topic of instrumentation, and control-loop design and tuning. Advanced control configurations are also considered, including split control and override control.

The right combination of hardware and software is used in the course to implement a ‘hands-on’ approach to process control system design. In this way, engineers and students alike will be able to experiment on virtual plants that capture important nonideal cases of the real world, and readily test even the most outlandish of control structures without resorting to non-intuitive mathematics or to placing real plants at risk [2]. This course has also considered integrating process safety and associated cost that are important for the global understanding of process control by the future chemical engineers. Finally, a combination of theory and applied methodology from real examples from the industry is used to provide a practical treatment of process control.

References

[1]. Tariq Samad, Margret Bauer, Scott Bortoff, Stefano Di Cairano, Lorenzo Fagiano, Peter Fogh Odgaard, R. Russell Rhinehart, Ricardo Sánchez-Peña, Atanas Serbezov, Finn Ankersen, Philippe Goupil, Benyamin Grosman, Marcel Heertjes, Iven Mareels, and Raye Sosseh, “Industry engagement with control research: Perspective and messages”, Annual Reviews in Control, Vol. 49, 2020, pp. 1-14, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arcontrol.2020.03.002.

[2]. William Y, Svrcek, Donald P. Mahoney, D.P., and Brent R. Young, “A Real-Time Approach to Process Control”, , 3^rd ed., John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2014. ISBN- 13: 9781119993872.