Throughout the chemical and process industries, ever more emphasis is being placed upon extracting increasingly greater value from plant equipment, with substantial interest in energy efficiency and responsible environmental stewardship. Improved process control is almost unique in its ability to deliver substantial operational efficiency and environmental improvements with relatively little additional capital investment. As such, process control has become one of the most sought after skills within the chemical and process industries. Industry needs graduates that are educated in the latest and most relevant skills. Industry practitioners rely heavily on commercially available process simulation tools and hands on, time domain based control strategy development techniques, e.g. [1-2]. This paper describes an integrated, real-time approach to the education of undergraduate chemical engineering students in process control system design [3-4]. The real-time approach to process control system design education integrates introductory process control education and industrial practice. The approach focuses on the more applied and practical time domain based techniques derived from modern process simulation. The use of computers is a central theme to the approach, and their use in simulations and the software is carefully introduced. The students gain a thorough understanding of instrumentation, process design versus controllability trade offs, control loop configurations and tuning, practical techniques for the control of unit operations and basic plant-wide control. This integrated, real-time approach to the education of undergraduate chemical engineering students in process dynamics and control has been taught as a capstone subject at the University of Calgary since 1997 using active, “hands on” or resource based learning [5-6]. A small number of lectures at the beginning of the course are advocated from a learning perspective to motivate students rather than to simply transmit information. A majority of “hands on” tutorial and / or simulation sessions are recommended on case studies, workshops or projects facilitated by the instructors [7]. The approach is illustrated by examples from this capstone course.
AN INTEGRATED, REAL-TIME APPROACH TO PROCESS CONTROL SYSTEM DESIGN EDUCATION