[Why a Consortium?] [Executive
Summary] [Partnership Structure]
[Program Achievements]
[Research Directions
of KA Hoo] [Research
Directions of JB Riggs]
Why a Process Control
Consortium?
Process control and optimization are industrially important. Improved process control results in one or more of the following benefits: lower product variability, higher value products, increased throughput, reduced utility usage, and improved safety. Because these benefits are economically important, the use of advanced process control is essential to companies engaged in competitive markets. But deciding upon what type of advanced control and how to apply it can be the difference between the failure or success of an advanced control project.
Optimization is simply getting the most (economically) out of a process. Due to the scale of processes in the refining and chemical industries, optimization can be a very attractive "carrot". But the choice of the level of detail in the optimization analysis, the maintainability of the system of models, and data reconciliation stand between industry and the carrot.
In times when investment capital is scarce, advanced control and optimization offer a means of improved operating efficiency and/or a means of producing higher valued products with only software changes, properly applied. The work that we are doing at Texas Tech is aimed at assisting industry in this pursuit.
Because the PMBC technology can be implemented in existing DCS microprocessors and personal computers it can be vendor-developed and offered as available options. It also can be developed in-house by process engineers. With our application perspective, we have developed the PMBC techniques into the initial implementation stage, and one reason for the partnership is to disseminate that technology.
But, the technology is low on the learning curve and offers the potential benefits of integrating unit controllers for plant-wide control, of artificial intelligence, of integrating statistical process control approaches, and of improved methods for model adjustment. These are applied development topics which are logical extensions of our experience and achievements. They offer near-term benefits to industry, and are not consistent with the long-term research exploration supported by government funding. If PMBC technology development is to continue, it must come from industrial funding; a second reason for the consortium.
Universities supply technically educated professionals and Texas Tech has the largest and most applications oriented control program in the Gulf-Southwest region. Traditionally, only a small portion of our graduate students are Americans. With increased financial support we can offer fellowships and attract more US citizens. The third reason for support is to increase the availability of control educated citizens.
Industrial support has allowed us to expand our control course offerings from two to five. We have an undergraduate lecture course on the basics of PID and advanced control. It is followed by an undergraduate laboratory course on instrumentation calibration, basic controller tuning, ratio, feed forward, and loop interaction. One graduate level course is review of PID and classical advanced control. Our second graduate lecture course covers such important theoretical topics as device dynamics, sampled data effects, digital filtering, model-predictive control, time series analysis, and PMBC. The courses include such important application topics as design of advanced control strategies, constraint handling, and multi-variable control. Finally, our graduate laboratory course includes ratio, cascade, feed forward, decouplers, gain scheduling, and model-based control. To make the education program larger and to maintain relevance, we need guidance, support, and political influence. Over the past five years, our control program graduates at the MS and PhD level have been hired by eleven US companies, and eight are working for Texas industries. Since industry benefits, help from industry is the fourth reason.
Finally, industrial support provides a strong program credibility toward obtaining institutional and government financial support.
[Why a Consortium?] [Executive
Summary] [Partnership Structure]
[Program Achievements] [Research
Directions of KA Hoo]
[Research Directions of JB Riggs]