Control of Dead-time Processes 2007th Edition

From the reviews:

This treatment is a welcome addition to the literature, especially for those who are interested in learning the prevailing methods and practices of process control. The authors have made a commendable effort to keep the required background to a minimum. Indeed, anyone with a background in linear systems and discrete-time systems from a typical engineering curriculum should be able to follow this book.

The book contains a generous number of practical examples. For most methods discussed, Matlab codes are also given. Heuristic reasoning and simulation illustrations are often used to motivate critical ideas. Many practical issues are also discussed. These features make the book especially appealing to thos with an interst in immediate application.

The material is well organized and nicely presented. The editorial quality is high with very few mistakes for a first edition. My only complaint is the authors’ tendency in a few places to use a sequence of two letters such as na, to represent a single variable, which is inconsistent with the practice in most parts of the book, where the more traditional form of one letter with subscript, such as n_a, is used. Overall, this book is a pleasure to read for both beginners and experts. The book is suitable as a textbook for a graduate level course or as a reference for practicing engineers. The first eight chapters can be considered as a textbook for a final year undergraduate course.

IEEE Control Systems Magazine October (2008) 136 – 137 (Reviewer: Keqin Gu)

Industrial processes and engineering, economic and biological systems commonly exhibit time delays or dead times. Dead time complicates the analysis and design of control systems and makes satisfactory control more difficult.

Control of Dead-time Processes 2007th Edition introduces the fundamental techniques for controlling dead-time processes ranging from simple monovariable to complex multivariable cases. Solutions to dead-time-process-control problems are studied using classical proportional-integral-differential (PID) control for the simpler examples and dead-time-compensator (DTC) and model predictive control (MPC) methods for progressively more complex ones. Although MPC and DTC approaches originate in different areas of control, both use predictors to overcome the effects of dead time. Using this fact, the text analyses MPC as a dead-time-compensation strategy and shows how it can be used synergistically with robust DTC tuning methodologies.

Graduate students working for their masters or PhDs in automatic control, chemical, electronic or mechanical engineering, in which dead-time processes are prevalent, will gain particular benefit from the following features of this text:

• interlinked study of PID, DTC and MPC for dead-time processes in a single source;

• exercises and further reading for each chapter;

• extensive use of illustrations, tables and examples;

• case studies based on real industrial problems with solutions that are simple to understand and easy to implement;

• MATLAB^® code developed by the authors to help analyse and control dead-time processes including code for all the examples in the book available for download from www.das.ufsc.br/~julio/deadtimebook and www.esi2.us.es/~eduardo/deadtimebook.

Control of Dead-time Processes 2007th Edition will also be of interest to control researchers and process control engineers. Chapters 1-8 of the text can be used as part ofthe final-year course for undergraduates in control or process engineering.