As I reflected on my career, I reaffirmed that what drives me is gaining a deeper understanding and sharing what I have learned, hopefully with a few laughs along the way. Throughout my career I sought with an open mind the knowledge and insights of the leaders in process modeling and control. I then used simulations to rapidly explore process relationships and to prototype control improvements that incorporate process understanding. The knowledge prepared me to solve tough plant control problems.

During my career at Monsanto I wrote a bunch of articles in the 1980s for InTech on my time in the plants with some humor introduced to help make the material more accessible and memorable. These articles were compiled and published in the book A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Control Room available for viewing as an E-book in the April 3, 2009 list of my books on this website. This is my favorite book, I didn't write much in the way of articles or books in the 1990s. I was on the road most of the time.

When I retired from Monsanto-Solutia in 2001 (sans package), I taught at Washington University. The students were great but after the course and lab was developed, it became routine. Also, I felt isolated.

I tell people I flunked retirement. I moved to Austin in September 2004 and started a second career as a part time consultant at Emerson Process Management. This gave me a chance to keep up to date with the latest new tools besides continue my exploration of process control opportunities. Plus it felt like home since Monsanto and Fisher Controls were one for most of my career.

I have been blessed with access to the best minds. In Monsanto's Engineering Technology I got to work with the leaders in process modeling and control. Some went on to distinguished chairs at prestigious universities, several were inducted into the Process Control Hall of Fame, some served as presidents of ISA and AIChE, and others left to become the principal technical resources for leading simulation companies. Here in Austin in Applied Research I get to work with the brains behind DeltaV. Plus my second career is more balanced. Except for the spike in work this year, I take a total of 4 months off each year to travel to see relatives, friends, and neat places and to write books.

Key points of my articles written in my post retirement years provide a quick overview of what I have been doing. The entries on this website in July will focus on the dozen articles I have written since retiring from my full time job. Here are the articles from 2003-2004.

"Has Your Valve Responded Lately", Control, May, 2003
"What is Your Flow Control Valve Telling You", Control Design, May 2004

Putman publications decided to do an encore publication in a second magazine. Some nomenclature typos were corrected in the reissue of the article in Control Design.

1. Deadband originates from backlash in the linkage and connections between the actuator and the plug, disc, or ball. Stick-slip comes from friction in stem packing and seals around the sealing of the plug, disc, or ball for process isolation

2. Deadband from linkage and connection backlash and stick-slip from trim and packing friction create deadtime for slowly changing controller outputs

3. Deadband will create a limit cycle in any control system where there are two integrators in series, such as a PI controller on an integrating process (e.g. level)

4. For deadband, the limit cycle amplitude is the ratio of deadband to controller gain

5. For stick-slip, the limit cycle amplitude is the product of the open loop gain and the stick-slip

6. For both deadband and stick-slip, the limit cycle period is proportional to the controller integral time and inversely related to the controller gain

7. Large actuators can have a large stroking time for a large change in signal

8. The size of the changes signal typically used to checkout control valves will not reveal the deadband or stick-slip and make all but the largest valves look good

9. A volume booster can reduce the stroking time of big actuators but has a large deadband. The booster should be put on the positioner output to quickly drive through this deadband. The booster bypass must be opened enough to prevent fast cycling from the positioner output looking into the booster's small inlet volume

10. Unstable oscillations can break out for large disturbances when the integral action in process loop becomes faster than the valve response. The integral time must be greater than the product of the valve slewing rate, disturbance size, and controller gain. (Not mentioned in the article but frequently discussed on the this website is that position read back from digital positioners and the PID dynamic reset limit option can automatically prevent the controller output from outrunning the valve)

11. Limit cycles are attenuated (filtered or washed out) by vessels or columns. The ratio of the attenuated to original amplitude is proportional to the period of the oscillation and inversely proportional to the residence time (volume/flow)

12. The control valve with the best response is a sliding stem valve with a digital positioner. If one must use a rotary valve, avoid tight shutoff and high friction packing and use a diaphragm actuator with a short shaft and splined connections between the actuator shaft and the stem of ball, disc, or plug. Make sure the stem is cast with the ball, disc, or plug to avoid another connection with backlash

Postscript: Rotary valves designed by piping manufacturers have a lot of deadband and stick-slip as discussed in the July 2009 Control Talk column "Downturn Turndown" in Control magazine.

"The Next Generation - Adaptive Control Takes a leap Forward", Chemical Processing, September, 2004

1. Nearly all controllers are detuned (backed off from maximum performance) to some degree to provide a smooth response and to deal with the inevitable changes in the process dynamics

2. Older technology adaptive controllers had these undesirable features
a. The process had to be disturbed or oscillated (e.g. patter recognition)
b. The dynamics were embedded in tuning settings
c. No real insight as to where the process has been or where it is going
d. Tuning method was fixed
e. Always playing catch up even if same situation was seen a thousand times

3. The next generation adaptive controller can
a. Normal changes in a controller's set point or manual output are used
b. The process dynamics are displayed and historized
c. From changes in the process dynamics, plant problems can be diagnosed
d. Several tuning methods are available
e. Tuning settings identified can be scheduled for preemptive action

4. "The information on changes in the process model may be directly used to monitor loop performance and to provide more intelligent diagnostics. The models can provide the dynamics for simulations and identify candidates for feedforward control and advanced control techniques. For example, loops dominated by a dead time or exhibiting disturbance models for multiple variables, are prime candidates for model predictive control. The dynamic process models in general can be used to create or adapt real time simulations for prototyping new control strategies, exploring "what if" scenarios, and training operators. Process gains that decrease or time constants that increase with feed totals are ripe for real time optimization of the run time between defrosting or cleaning and catalyst reactivation or replacement. The beauty of this route is the models and tuning settings are available from the adaptive controller for a higher level of control by a better knowledge of the topology"

"Advanced Control Smorgasbord - A Lot of Tasty Choices", Control, May, 2004

The online version is missing the following introductory sentences at the beginning of the first paragraph.

"By the time I was assigned to my first electronic control room project, some very smart engineers had already developed most of the techniques to exploit PID controllers.
Relative gain arrays and simple decoupling of the controller output were used to analyze and deal with interaction on a steady state gain basis. The outputs from PID controllers, whose process variable was a constraint variable, were sent to a signal selector to form an override control scheme to maximize or minimize a manipulated variable."

1. Previously, advanced process control (APC) required software packages at $100K a clip, separate computers, special interfaces, and consultants to do the studies and implementation. The total bill could easily approach or exceed a million dollars for a medium project, the biggest chunk being the consultant's time charges. Even a greater consideration was that the process knowledge to exploit or to just maintain the system disappeared when the consultants left the site

2. At the turn of the century, APC technologies were integrated into the basic process control system. License fees were minimal and whole cost of implementation decreased by a factor of twenty or more by the automation of the configuration, displays, testing, simulation, and tuning

3. In the time it takes to read this article, a model predictive controller or neural network could have been configured

4. Perhaps the biggest opportunity for driving the application of APC is the development of online process performance indicators

5. The key variable for process performance monitoring is the ratio of the manipulated flow to the feed flow

6. The controlled variable is best expressed and plotted as a function of the flow ratio (e.g. pH versus reagent to feed ratio, column temperature versus reflux to feed ratio, exchanger temperature versus coolant to feed ratio, and stack oxygen is versus air to fuel ratio)

7. The process efficiency is seen in difference between the actual and optimum ratio rather than in the gap between the actual and optimum controlled variable

8. A novel method has been developed to use model predictive control (MPC) to simultaneously adapt multiple first principle process model parameters

9. For closed loop process control, consider
a. PID for tight control of integrating or runaway processes
b. MPC for multivariable control, interactions, and optimization

10. For online property estimators for continuous processes, consider
a. ANN for highly nonlinear predictions with uncorrelated inputs
b. LDE for lag dominated linear predictions with uncorrelated inputs
c. PLS for steady state predictions from large number of correlated inputs

ANN is an artificial neural network, LDE is a linear dynamic estimator, and PLS is a projection to latent structures or partial least squares prediction discussed in Chapter 8 of Advanced Control Unleashed