A discussion of chemical process control education and practice

This article presents a discussion of paper “Chemical process control education and practice”. We emphasize the major differences between chemical process control and the control of mechanical systems. This is accomplished by considering a simple chemical process and illustrating areas where the dynamic system model differs significantly form mechanical systems. Some features encountered in chemical process models include, nonlinearities, extremely long time constants, (extremely short time constants), time delays, parameter uncertainty and the inability to measure the system states. These properties make control system design for chemical systems quite challenging