Process Control Systems Engineering

Process Control Systems (PCS) are distributed control systems (DCS) that are specialized to meet the requirements of the process industries. Many processes and plants of that domain have high safety and availability requirements, are instrumented with a large number of sensors and actuators and show a rather high degree of automation at least in standard operation regimes.

There are remarkable differences and cross-discipline interdependencies between chemical-physical properties of the substances, prodedures, unit operations, equipment, instrumentation and control strategies. This results in the observation that there hardly any two plants that are identical, even if the products are interchangeable. Thus, it is not surprising, that there is an ongoing discussion if each domain of the process industries, namely chemicals, pharma, pulp & paper, oil & gas, food & beverages and water/waste water treatment should have its own specialized automation system. On the contrary, there are some opinions that PCS architectures that address all of the distinct requirements of the process industries, should even be generic enough to render the distinction between PCS and e.g. DCS for power generation and distribution a merely marketing or historical issue, not a technical one.

This text book contributes towards that discussion simply by putting its focus on PCS engineering basics that are common to the different domains of the process industries. The examples and exercises are related to an experimental research plant which serves for the exploration of the interaction between process modularization and process automation methods in the process industries. This makes it possible to capture features of highly specialized and integrated mono-product plants (e.g. chemicals) as well as application areas which are dominated by locally standardized general-purpose apparatus and multi-product schemes (bio-chemistry, pharma). While the theory presented in this text book is applicable for all of the PCS of the different established vendors, the examples as well as most of the screen shots refer to PCS 7, Siemens’ control system for the process industries. Focusing on a single PCS makes it possible to use this text book not only in basic lectures on PCS Engineering but also in computer lab courses that allow students gaining hands-on experience.