Research in Process Control

So many people are confused at what I actually do. To be honest, I was confused myself in the beginning of my postgraduate career, having no idea of what I was actually doing. Frankly speaking, I felt like I have wasted my first year of PhD. study achieving nothing. This is mainly because of all the mistakes I did and all the fail propositions I have come up with. But now in my third year, when I look back, it seems quite different. One quote from Edison has helped me realize that doing mistakes is part of a research life "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Now, lets go into more details on what my PhD. study is about. The current title of thesis I have is "Operability Analysis of Plantwide Chemical Processes". Out of so many people I have met throughout this 3 years, I have met only few (~1%) that can understand that. Of course, this number excludes my supervisor, colleagues, and other researchers in the same field.

To start, I better explain where we can find 'control engineering' in our daily lives. Electrical appliances are stuffs that utilize control engineering the most I would say. Take an example, air conditioners. Have you ever thought about what is the mechanism behind how air-conds can manage to cool/heat the room to the temperature you set. Some of you might have. The simplest way to explain is there must be a temperature sensor in the machine that tells you what the temperature of the room is. Then using this knowledge, a computer logic inside the air-cond will work out how much cooling/heating is needed to achieve the temperature you set. It's simple right? That was the idea behind 'control engineering'. So process control just refers to the control engineering of chemical 'processes', like reactors, distillation columns, even simple stuffs like mixing tanks.

Of course, in reality it is not that simple of just measuring and calculating. It involves very complex computations in a real control engineering, especially in a chemical processing plant. One obvious reason is a plant is just large in size (imagine the amounts of pumps existing). But the actual difficulty comes from because all the units in a large-plant are connected to each other.
That's what my research is all about. "Operability Analysis of Plantwide Chemical Processes" means that in a big chemical plants with so many units interconnected to each other, can we operate the plant to achieve what we want. It sounds simple, but I tell you it's NOT.