AR2016

Department of Chemical Engineering

Annual Report 2015

PROSESS SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

Academic staff

Professor Sigurd Skogestad

Professor Heinz A. Preisig

Associate professor Tore Haug-Warberg

Associate professor Nadav Bar

Associate professor Johannes Jäschke

Adjunct professor Krister Forsman (Perstorp, Sweden)

Professor emeritus Terje Hertzberg

Post Doc

Suwartadi, Eka (from 01.09.2015)

Backi, Christoph J. (from 01.09.2015)

Jahanshahi, Esmaeil (20% from 01.09.2015)

PhD candidates

Birgen, Cansu (from 01.07.2015)

Bouza, Pablo Julian

Das, Tamal (from 30.03.2015)

de Oliveira, Vinicius (unitil 29.04.2016)

Doni Jayavelu, Naresh (until 26.03.2015)

Elve, Arne Tobias (from 01.10.2015)

Grimholt, Chriss Karolius, Sigve (from 01.05.2015)

Minasidis, Vladimiros L.

Reyes Lua, Adriana

Skancke, Jørgen

Straus, Julian

Verheyleweghen, Adriaen (from 10.08.2015)

Guests

Le Roux, Derik, (visiting PhD from Univ. of Pretoria,

South Africa, 02May-05Jul)

Qian, Xing (visiting PhD from Tianjin Univ., China, from

29.08)

Sun, Bo, visiting PhD from Shanghai Jiao Tong

University, China (until 23 Oct. 2015)

Paksiova, Daniela (visiting PhD from STUBA, Slovakia,

03.09-19.12)

Bisgaard, Thomas (visiting PhD from DTU, Denmark,

03.08-30.10)

Pedersen, Simon (visiting PhD from Aalborg Univ.,

Denmark, 02.10-28.11)

Soltesz, Kristian (visiting postdoc from Lund, Sweden,

07.09-18.09)

Sutil, Mario (visiting researcher from Univ. of

Salamanca, Spain, 15.07-29.07)

PROFILE:

Process systems engineering deals with the overall

system behaviour, and how the individual units should

be combined and operated to achieve optimal overall

performance. Important topics are process modelling on

all scales, operation and control, design and synthesis,

and simulation, statistics and optimization. The group

closely cooperates with other systems-oriented

departments at the university, including Engineering

Cybernetics, Energy and Process Engineering and

Industrial Ecology, and also with SINTEF. The process

systems engineering activity at NTNU (PROST) holds high

international standards and was already in 1994

recognized as a strong-point centre, both by NTNU and

SINTEF.

PROCESS CONTROL ACTIVITIES

Industrial use of advanced process control increases

rapidly, and candidates who combine process knowledge

and control expertise are in high demand in industry.

Control is an enabling technology, thus basic for any

industry-based society. The use of advanced control is

transforming industries previously regarded as "low-

tech" into "high-tech". In process control (Sigurd

Skogestad, Johannes Jäschke, Heinz Preisig and Krister

Forsman), the objective of the research is to develop

simple yet rigorous tools to solve problems significant to

industrial applications.

Up to now, the design of the overall "plant-wide" control

structure has been based on engineering experience and

intuition, whilst the aim has been to develop rigorous

techniques. The concept of "self-optimizing control"

provides a basis for linking economic optimization and

control (Sigurd Skogestad). For example, for a marathon

runner, the heart rate may be a good "self-optimizing"

variable that may be kept constant in spite of

uncertainty. Control is done in a hierarchical construct.

At the bottom of the hierarchy, the main issue is to

"stabilize" the operation and follow the setpoints

provided by the layer above. Further up in the hierarchy

one finds optimising control co-ordinating the control of

units and plants. A special case is sequential control,

which is used to implement recipes in batch operations

but also is the basics of handling start-up and shut-down