Diagnosis of Process Nonlinearities and Valve Stiction : Data Driven Approaches

The subject matter of the book is concerned with the detection and diagnosis of process nonlinearities from routine process data. In general, processes can be treated as locally linear and measures of overall process performance can be monitored from routine operating data. However when process performance is not satisfactory then it is imperative that the cause of poor performance be diagnosed. Poor performance can be due to several reasons. Statistics abound on the cause of poor control performance. It has been documented that as many as 40% of the control loops in industry perform unsatisfactorily because of valve problems, a majority of them due to valve stiction, causing the closed loop system to become nonlinear. The development of signal processing methods to detect and quantify process nonlinearity from routine process data is the main subject matter of this book.

M. A. A. Shoukat Choudhury received his B. Sc. Engineering (Chemical) from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1996. He was awarded a gold medal for his outstanding results in B. Sc. Engineering. He obtained an M. Sc. Engineering (Chemical) in 1998 from the same university. He has completed his PhD degree in process control (Chemical Engineering) at the University of Alberta, Canada. For his outstanding research performance during the course of PhD program he has been awarded several awards such as University of Alberta PhD Dissertation Fellowship, Andrew Stewart Memorial Prize and ISA Educational Foundation Scholarship. He is the principal inventor of an internation patent (applied, 2005) on "Methods for Detection and Quantification of Control Valve Stiction". The methodologies and algorithms described in this patent are implemented and available in the commercial software ProcessDoctor from Matrikon Inc. His main research interests include diagnosis of poor control performance, stiction in control valves, data compression, control loop performance assessment and monitoring, and diagnosis of plant wide oscillations.

Sirish Shah received his B.Sc. degree in control engineering from Leeds University in 1971, a M.Sc. degree in automatic control from UMIST, Manchester in 1972, and a Ph.D. degree in process control (chemical engineering) from the University of Alberta in 1976. During 1977 he worked as a computer applications engineer at Esso Chemicals in Sarnia, Ontario. Since 1978 he has been with the University of Alberta, where currently holds the NSERC-Matrikon-ASRA Senior Industrial Research Chair in Computer Process Control. In 1989, he was the recipient of the Albright & Wilson Americas Award of the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering in recognition of distinguished contributions to chemical engineering. He has held visiting appointments at Oxford University and Balliol College as a SERC fellow in 1985-86 and at Kumamoto University, Japan as a senior research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) in 1994. The main area of his current research is process and performance monitoring, system identification and design and implementation of softsensors. He has recently co-authored a book titled, Performance Assessment of Control Loops: Theory and Applications. He has held consulting appointments with a wide variety of process Industries and has also taught many industrial courses.