OVERVIEW

The term process control implies that there is a process for which there is a desired behavior and that there is some controlling function that acts to elicit that desired behavior. This broad concept can embrace everything from societal processes governed by some regulatory control authority to automated manufacturing processes. In practically all cases, however, a common thread is that some measure of the actual process behavior is compared with the desired process behavior. This feedback action then generates a control policy that acts to minimize or eliminate the deviation between desired and actual behavior.

We are concerned in this book with a particular segment of automated process control that which is applied to chemical, refining, pulp and paper, power generation, and similar types of processes. Even within this limited scope of applications, we will limit the discussion primarily to processes that are operated continuously for long periods of time and within a narrow region of the operating variables. In other words, we exclude such important operating modes as batch processing, start-ups, and grade changes. Many of the control techniques to be presented here, however, can be adapted to these other modes of operation.

For the processes we focus on in this book, the process's behavior is often characterized by measured values of such process variables as temperatures, flow rates, pressures, and the like. The desired behavior, then, is stated to be the set points of those process variables. Until fairly recent times, most applications of industrial...