PREFACE

This book presents a practical approach to process control for the chemical, refining, pulp and paper, utilities, and similar industries. It is the result of seminars in process control that I have presented both in the United States and abroad. A typical participant in my seminars is an engineer, currently employed by a processing company, who may have had formal training in an undergraduate process control course but who may not be able to fully relate the material from that course to his or her work experiences. This book aims to meet this need by explaining concepts in a practical way with only a minimal amount of theoretical background. The book serves both the beginning and the experienced control systems engineer. For the beginning engineer, it initially presents very simple concepts. For the experienced engineer, it develops these initial concepts so as to provide deeper understanding or new insights into familiar concepts. The purpose is to provide everyone, beginner or experienced engineer, with something they can put to beneficial use in their plant. This edition also develops a unique method of controller tuning and a novel form of decoupling control, both of which were only introduced briefly in the first edition. The impact on control strategy configuration of advances in the standardization of fieldbus communication systems for process control is discussed. The coverage of model predictive control has been expanded to reflect the wider acceptance of this technology, the development of more efficient systems, and falling prices for the supporting hardware platform. This edition also includes a new set of process control strategy application examples. Although this is intended to be a practical how-to book, readers should not infer that this means it is devoid of mathematical concepts. Where such concepts are utilized, however, it is their application to practical situations, rather than the theory behind the concepts, that is emphasized. A theme of the first editionthat wherever I had to choose between providing mathematical rigor or promoting intuitive understanding, I always gave preference to understandabilityhas been carried forward into the present edition. This practicality distinguishes this book from many academic texts. The book is organized generally into three parts. The first three chapters present background information, including a brief nonrigorous mathematical review, a discussion of symbols and terminology, and a description of general characteristics of processes and of selected types of control loops.

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BASIC AND ADVANCED REGULATORY CONTROL: SYSTEM DESIGN AND APPLICATION

The second partchapters 4 through 7deals with feedback control. The objective is to provide the reader with a thorough intuitive grasp of feedback control behavior and all its nuances. In the chapter on feedback controller tuning (chapter 6), the discussion on improving as-found tuning (also called intelligent trial-and-error tuning) has been considerably expanded, and supplemented by the presentation of a tuning flow chart that embodies this technique. This new tuning technique has been proven in practical applications and has been well accepted in training classes where it has been presented. In this same chapter, new material is included on tuning liquid-level control loops. The tuning of these loops, which have a completely different characteristic from most other process control loops, has in general received very little specific attention in the process control literature. The last portion of the bookchapters 8 through 16begins by defining the feedback penalty that must be paid if feedback control alone is used. This leads into a discussion of advanced regulatory control techniques (chapter 9), including chapters on cascade (chapter 10), ratio (chapter 11), feedforward (chapter 12), override (chapter 13), decoupling (chapter 13), model-based (chapter 14), and model predictive control (chapter 15). The chapter on feedforward control offers expanded coverage on the application of multiplicative feedforward control. The chapter on override (selector) control includes additional application examples for this technique, as well as an assessment of the performance of several alternative techniques. The chapter on the control of multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) processes (chapter 15) contains additional coverage of inverted decoupling. This MIMO technique was introduced in the first edition; new material previously available only in technical journals is presented here. The chapter on model-based control in the first edition has been split into two chapters. Chapter 14, devoted primarily to dead-time compensation, covers Smith predictor control, internal model control, and Dahlins algorithm. The other chapter, chapter 15, contains very significantly expanded coverage of model predictive control. The concluding chapter, which is almost entirely new, covers process control application topics that do not readily fit into any of the other chapters. In addition to cross-limiting control for fired heaters, which was covered in the first edition, these new topics include floating control, techniques for increasing valve rangeability, and time proportioning control. One of the themes of this book is to emphasize control strategies that are platform independent. However, since the appearance of the first edition, FOUNDATION Fieldbus (FF), which permits the control strategy to be distributed directly into field devices, has grown in acceptance. The network architecture, communication, and implementation aspects of FF are briefly summarized in chapter 5. In this edition, the process control aspects of FF receive greater coverage. Moreover, the chapters on modifications to feedback control, cascade, ratio, feedforward, and override (chapters 5, 9, 10, 11, and 12) all conclude with an example in which that chapters strategy is implemented using FF function blocks. I would like to express gratitude to the many students who, by asking probing questions, have enabled me to revise and sharpen my presentation and come up with more meaningful exam-

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ples. In particular, I would like to thank the engineers at BASFFreeport for encouraging me to develop the controller tuning flow chart, to the staff of the ISA Training Institute for their support during my seminars, and to Adrian and Ivan Susanto in Indonesia and Michael Wang in Taiwan for sponsoring courses and providing me with an opportunity for travel abroad. I would also like to express my thanks to Dr. R. Russell Rhinehart for many helpful comments and suggestions, to my longtime friend and mentor (and reviewer of this book) Greg Shinskey, as well as to John Shaw, Jonas Berge, and Bryan Griffen who have reviewed all or parts of this book. And I have special thanks for Susan Colwell, who, through humor and patience, has helped me endure the arduous task of writing.

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