Automatic Control in the Process Industries

A typical characteristic of much of the chemical process industry is that the operating plants appear to require little human supervision. The process units are often extensively instrumented and the desired operating conditions are maintained rigidly by arrays of control instruments. Automatic control is clearly an important feature of modern processing. 

The process industries were among the first to make widespread use of automatic controls with the attendant advantages of continuous operation, improved yields and product quality and the general adaptability of the many processes and operations to automatic regulation has contributed greatly to the rapid growth of the industry. 

Because of this ready adaptability of the processes and process equipment to automatic control there has been little incentive to develop a sound quantitative theory of automatic process control. Chemical engineering ingenuity has been applied to more immediately profitable process problems. Processes involving difficult control problems have 

However it is obvious in many operations that improved overall performance can result from a clearer understanding of the control problems. Furthermore, the trends toward greater integration of operations and the exploitation of faster processes require that the control problems be handled in a quantitative manner by process engineers. The nature of control problems and what is involved in handling them, are discussed in Parts II and III. 

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Much of the advertising used in the USA between 1890 and 1920 to promote recording instruments concentrated on their role in keeping check on workmen. See S. Bennett, "The industrial instrument - Master of industry, servant of management" Automatic control in the process industries, 1900-1940 , Technology and Culture, 32 (1991), 69-81. 

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