System engineering, ideas

The safety-lifecycle has been discussed detailed in the previous chapter of this book. For the second objective some further views based on the system engineering ideas have to be more detailed evaluated more detailed. 

In this chapter we focus on implementation components executable code, source code, interface specs, code templates, and the like. In this context, a component is similar to the well-known software engineering idea of a module, although we have standards in place and technology infrastructure that makes building distributed component systems a reality. 

Since many of our chemical engineering processes are nonlinear, it would seem intuitively advantageous to use nonlinear controllers in some systems. The idea is to modify the controller action and/or settings in some way to compensate for the nonlinearity of the process. 

On the other hand, the industrial application of a new technological method must face many practical engineering problems, in addition to those of the method itself, which must be solved appropriately with the ideas of system engineering. Otherwise, successful application is difficult, even if the technology is very nice. 

Tt is a complex and tedious task to understand completely the behavior and interaction of biological systems. Redundancies, interactions, and complexities are well beyond what might be imagined necessary for a physical or engineering system. Regardless of this, ideas are formed on the interaction of components, and theories are advanced to explain the behavior of biological systems. These ideas and theories constitute conceptual models which are evaluated and tested in experiments designed for that purpose. 

Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern Cahfornia, reported on his better idea. Instead of sintering a layer by scanning it with a laser beam, his system quickly fuses the whole layer under an oven-like electric or gas heater. The powder outside the part s outline does not solidify because it gets treated in advance with a special liquid. Khoshnevis says his patented approach can polish off each layer in less than 15 seconds. In addition, it does not need a laser, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. 

In chemical process systems engineering, it has been widely acknowledged that the choice of control structure has a profound effect on performance, is much more important than the choice of control algorithm, and it is second only to plant design in importance for effective control [25-28], In a way that is analogous to the choice of control structure in the constructive approach, the choice of estimation structure has been considered to attain robustness via passivation [16-19]. The idea is that the standard Kalman filter (EKF) and Luenberger (L) nonlinear estimators have structures that are fixed by the (possibly ill-conditioned) detectability property of the estimation model, and that robustness-oriented passive estimation structures can be designed for the purpose at hand [19]. 

Cost reduction is possible if safety requirements are considered as early as possible in the development process. Therefore, development phases and applied safety methods have to be understood. With our expertise in systems engineering research projects, we have a clear idea, which methods should and can be applied during early development phases (Berres, Schumann, and Escher 2012). However to help engineers, we would like to follow a pragmatic approach and try to understand which methods and tools were applied during development. 

This process follows the System Engineering approach, a method often applied to the realisation of engineering projects. The underlying idea of this approach is that process transparency and the implementation of sound engineering principles should lead the involved parties to suitable specifications for the construction of the hydraulic fill. Suitability of specifications implies that the functional requirements of the fill mass will be met within the wanted safety margins (and, hence, without excessive costs), but at the same time ensures that the hydraulic fill can be constructed in a feasible and economic manner. This will reduce excessive costs, unwanted disputes, arbitrations and lawsuits. 

The chapter itself is organized as follows. In Section 11.1, we discuss experiments in which data can be organized using mass transfer coefficients. Section 11.2 describes blood oxygenators and artificial kidneys, mass transfer devices whose geometry is exactly known. Section 11.3 discusses the role of mass transfer in pharmacokinetics, where the system s geometry is unknown, lumped into other parameters which may include the mass transfer coefficient. Thus the chapter provides an introduction for life scientists to important engineering ideas. 

---