Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Introduction to Process
Control
A Career in Process Control
• Requires that engineers use all of their
chemical engineering training (i.e., provides
an excellent technical profession that can
last an entire career)
• Can become a technical “Top Gun”
• Allows engineers to work on projects that
can result in significant savings for their
companies (i.e., provides good visibility
within a company)
A Career in Process Control
• Provides professional mobility. There is a
shortage of experienced process control
engineers.
• Is a well paid technical profession for
chemical engineers.
Chemical Process Industries (CPI)
• Hydrocarbon fuels
• Chemical products
• Pulp and paper products
• Agrochemicals
• Man-made fibers
Bio-Process Industries
• Use micro-organisms to produce useful
products
• Pharmaceutical industry
• Ethanol from grain industry
Importance of Process Control for
the CPI
• PC directly affects the safety and reliability
of a process.
• PC determines the quality of the products
produced by a process.
• PC can affect how efficient a process is
operated.
• Bottom Line: PC has a major impact on the
profitability of a company in the CPI.
Safety and Reliability
• The control system must provide safe
operation
– Alarms, safety constraint control, start-up and
shutdown.
• A control system must be able to “absorb” a
variety of disturbances and keep the process
in a good operating region:
– Thunderstorms, feed composition upsets,
temporary loss of utilities (e.g., steam supply),
day to night variation in the ambient conditions
Benefits of Improved Control
Old Controller
Concentration
Limit
Impurity
Time
Benefits of Improved Control
Old Controller New Controller
Concentration
Concentration
Limit Limit
Impurity
Impurity
Time Time
Better Control Means Products
with Reduced Variability
• For many cases, reduced variability
products are in high demand and have high
value added (e.g., feedstocks for polymers).
• Product certification procedures (e.g., ISO
9000) are used to guarantee product quality
and place a large emphasis on process
control.
Benefits of Improved Control
Old Controller New Controller
Concentration
Concentration
Limit Limit
Impurity
Impurity
Time Time
Improved Performance
Concentration
Limit
Impurity
Time
Maximizing the Profit of a Plant
• Many times involves controlling against
constraints.
• The closer that you are able to operate to
these constraints, the more profit you can
make. For example, maximizing the
product production rate usually involving
controlling the process against one or more
process constraints.
Constraint Control Example
• Consider a reactor temperature control
example for which at excessively high
temperatures the reactor will experience a
temperature runaway and explode.
• But the higher the temperature the greater
the product yield.
• Therefore, better reactor temperature control
allows safe operation at a higher reactor
temperature and thus more profit.
Importance of Process Control for the
Bio-Process Industries
Q C A VA Q C B VB Q CC VC Q C A0 VAF
2
Economic Objective
1.5
1
Function,
0.5 T*
0
250 275 300 325 350
-0.5
Reactor Temperature (K)
Process Optimization
• Typical optimization objective function, :
= Product values-Feed costs-Utility
costs
• The steady-state solution of process models
is usually used to determine process
operating conditions which yields flow rates
of products, feed, and utilities.
• Unit costs of feed and sale price of products
are combined with flows to yield
• Optimization variables are adjusted until
Generalized Optimization
Procedure
Optimization Economic
Variables Function
Value
Model
Results Economic
Process Economic
Function
Model Parameters
Evaluation
Optimization and Control of a CSTR