for money. This is even more the case with the paperbackedition at just £40, especially as it is rather more user-friendly for reading on trains and planes. The book deservesa place on the library shelves of all universities, depart-ments and companies, and of any practising engineerinvolved in this wide-ranging field. I will certainly find itvaluable myself, and particularly wish I had had it whenfirst starting out as a process engineer!

The Integration of Process Design and ControlEdited by Panos Seferlis and Michael C. GeorgiadisElsevier, 2004654 pp, $235/Euro 235, ISBN 0 444 51557 7

Reviewed by Professor Nilay Shah(Department of Chemical Engineering and ChemicalTechnology, Imperial College London, UK)

This book is a selection of papers from a conference of thesame name. The objective is to present the state-of-the-artin research and industrial practice in interactions ofdesign and control, analysis and design of plantwide controlsystems and integrated methods for design and control.

The book has been well-structured in that it is muchmore than just a collection of papers in this area. Followinga thoughtful analysis by the editors of the need for develop-ments in this area and a summary of the contributions, it isorganized in four parts:

i. Process characterization and controllability analysisii. Integrated process design and control – methods

iii. Plantwide interactions of design and controliv. Integrated process design and control – extensions

The first section starts with an excellent discussion on theneed for ‘simultaneous design education’ by a long-standingresearcher in this field, William Luyben. He provides agood motivation for the rest of the book using some verystraightforward examples. The examples all demonstratethat the ‘traditional’ sequential approach of completingthe design and then thinking about control may lead topoor dynamic performance of the process which in turnresults in poor process economics. He gives a personalview of technical developments in the area and summarizeswith the notion that all final year chemical engineeringstudents should be taught simultaneous design.

This is followed by a very useful paper on processcharacterization, which uses a 3-d cube with dimensions

representing degree of non-linearity, dynamic characterand degree of interaction to determine how difficult a pro-cess will be to control, and also what control strategies aresuitable for different parts of the cube.

Further chapters build on these topics and provide moredetailed analyses of non-linearity, operability andcontrollability.

The second section describes methods for the integratedsolution of process design and process control problems.The aim here is to determine simultaneously the detailsof the design (plant topology, equipment specifications,operating conditions) and control system (control structureconfiguration and selection of tuning parameters). Thesemust be selected to guarantee good performance of thesystem in the face of disturbances and uncertainty. Thepapers essentially describe alternative model-based tech-niques for achieving these objectives. They do indicatethat if process models are available, there are now practical,if sophisticated, mathematical techniques available to solvethis problem.

The third section builds on the second section by focus-ing on plantwide interactions. It starts with a description ofthe plantwide control problem from the industrial perspec-tive, and explains how different designs result in differentplantwide dynamic performance. This is followed by apractical methodology to assess and improve plantwidecontrollability at the process design stage. A variety ofexamples are used to support the author’s arguments. Sub-sequent papers describe how to design plantwide controlstructures, material balance control and control structureselection.

The final section of the book is somewhat more discur-sive and acts as a catch-all for emerging topics. Theseinclude ‘self-optimizing’ control, applied to plants thathave already been designed. This should be supported bycloser collaboration between control and design engineers.Other contributions are in the areas of batch process control(where hierarchical integration is important), quality con-trol and six-sigma methodologies, multi-objective designand control, design of decoupled pole placement controllersand non-linear control of batch reactors.

Overall, the volume turned out to be very interesting, anddespite its origins in research conference proceedings, has avery practical orientation. It gives a good summary of thestate-of-the-art in the integration of design and controland would be a useful reference for practitioners who areeither interested in process control or in designing pro-cesses that are easier to control.

Trans IChemE, Part A, Chemical Engineering Research and Design, 2005, 83(A9): 1155–1156

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