Process Dynamics and Control

Advanced Process Control’s (APC) acceptance in the Chemical, Petrochemical and Oil & Gas industries in recent years is due to the industry’s ever growing need to cut operating costs for the competitive edge. At the same time, it is due to their need for safety and pollution prevention. Complex processing schemes and handling of very large volumes of hazardous material also force these industries to continuously look at newer techniques. Moreover, a majority of the process technologies in these industries are based on continuous process operation and are accordingly well suited for deployment of latest technologies such as the APC.

Apart from the underlying theoretical basis that came from the academia, APC relies heavily on advanced mathematical tools in software form. APC vendors have, to a large extent encapsulated the underlying theory and mathematics into their implementation of the APC algorithms. While this is beneficial from the point of view of project execution and application engineering, it is more than likely that it makes a particular APC technique a “black box” for the end user’s engineering and operations team.

This course is intended for such end user and vendor industry engineers who are keen to improve their skills in this field for profitable deployment of available control algorithms available within the programmable control systems. In order to achieve that objective they need to understand the theoretical background and the mathematics behind the APC tools and algorithms.

While the course presumes that the attendees possess Chemical Engineering background, experienced Instrumentation and Electronics engineers from these industries may also find the course useful. Two modules are planned – The first module covers the basic process dynamics and control theory and associated mathematics in some detail, the second covers some of the industry implemented APC technologies. The first module is a pre-requisite for the second module.