(57a) Providing An Industry-Relevant Perspective to the Process Control Curriculum with Simulation Tools

Hands-on challenges that demonstrate and reinforce important concepts benefit the learning process. This is especially true for the often abstract subject of process dynamics and control. Hands-on challenges can be motivating, promote critical thinking, facilitate understanding in the use and limitations of the theory, and help prepare students for the challenges of the professional world.

Too often, the application of textbook theory is limited to solving questions listed at the end of the chapter. One typical question is to have the student expand or extend a mathematical development presented in the book. Another is to provide bits of data and challenge the student to select and employ a combination of formulas to obtain a desired result.

Unfortunately, even when cleverly crafted, these textbook problems fall short of providing students the depth or breadth of practice required for comprehension and mastery. Thus, like most academic institutions, the Chemical Engineering Program at the University of Connecticut supplements textbook learning with unit operations laboratory exercises. Hands-on laboratory exercises are extremely important to learning because they help students make the intellectual transition from theory to practice. The abstractions presented in textbooks are literally brought to life through the tactile nature of a lab experience.

The reality of a unit operations laboratory, unfortunately, is that each study can take many hours and even days to perform. Also, equipment failures and other problems teach the important lesson that the real world can be uncertain. However, this lesson is not usually intended to be the objective of a particular assignment. Thus, students rarely explore more than a very few central concepts in the lab.

A training simulator offers an alluring method for providing students with the significant hands-on practice critical to learning process control. The proper tool can provide virtual experience much the way airplane and power plant simulators do in those fields. It can give students a broad range of focused engineering applications of theory in an efficient, safe and economical fashion. And it can work as an instructional companion as it provides interactive challenges that track along with classroom lectures.

Process control is a subject area well suited to exploit the benefits of a training simulator. Modern control installations are computer based, so a video display is the natural window through which the subject is practiced. With color graphic animation and interactive challenges, a training simulator can offer experiences that literally rival those of the real world. These experiences can be obtained risk free and at minimal cost, enabling students to feel comfortable exploring nonstandard solutions at their desk. If properly designed as a pedagogical tool with case studies organized to present incremental challenges, learning can be enormously enhanced for process control with such a training simulator.

Instructional tool for process dynamics and control should be visually appealing, easy-to use and accepted by students and practitioners. Loop-Pro is software designed to meet these goals so students will:

- learn how to collect and analyze process data to determine the essential dynamic behavior of a process,

- experience what "good" or "best" control performance means for a particular process,

- understand the computational methods behind the different control algorithms and learn when and how to use each one to achieve best performance,

- practice how adjusting the different tuning parameters required for control algorithm implementation impact control performance and explore how to determine values for these parameters,

- become aware of the limitations and pitfalls of each control algorithm and learn how to turn this knowledge to their advantage.

Loop-Pro is composed of three modules: Case Studies, Custom Process and Design Tools. The Case Studies module provides real-world experience in modern methods and practices of process control through a collection of realistic processes to practice upon. The Custom Process module is a block oriented environment that lets students construct a process and controller architecture to their own specifications for a wide range of custom control analyses. The Design Tools module is used to fit approximating dynamic models to process data and to compute PID controller tuning values. The models from Design Tools can also be used to construct advanced control strategies that use process models internal to the controller architecture such as feed forward and model predictive control.

This paper explores the use of the Loop-Pro training simulator for process control education. In particular, the discussion focuses on how this simulator bridges the gap between textbook theory and laboratory learning. Methods and benefits of using Loop-Pro in the undergraduate curriculum are presented. Loop-Pro is currently used by more than 150 universities and colleges worldwide.