INTRODUCTION

This section focuses on plant analysis, design, and controller tuning issues that relate to the efficient manufacture of uniform product in continuous process plants, such as paper, plastics, rubber, chemicals, hydrocarbons, pharmaceuticals, food, and others. Joseph P. Shunta, in his book World Class Manufacturing through Process Control [1], provides an excellent balanced treatment of the application of process control and where this fits into the big picture of World Class manufacturing. The central theme is the reduction of process variability through better process control, and in some cases, better process design, so that a more uniform, higher-quality product that better conforms to customer specifications can be manufactured more efficiently. These goals link directly with corporate goals of gaining market share, reducing manufacturing costs, and increasing shareholder value. There are many issues involved, both technical and organizational, that must be overcome for a company to become a world class manufacturer. This section embraces Shunta s work completely where it addresses the big issues in process control application. There are, however, a number of key technical issues such as process variability, its origins and sources, time series analysis, model-based controller tuning, and the impact of control valve nonlinearities that are covered in detail in this section. This section is based on two decades of intensive work in process variability reduction in the pulp and paper industry, from which, of necessity, a slightly different focus has emerged. The work...