Siddharth Mehta

Former MASc Student

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The integration of design and control of chemical processes have been identified as a key area of research and many methodologies have been proposed to address the issue. We are working on developing a new methodology for integration of design and control under process disturbances and parameter uncertainty using Power Series Expansions (PSE) approximations. The key idea in this methodology is to “back-off” (move away) from the steady state design (Figure below on the right), which might be infeasible due to process disturbances and parameter uncertainty, to obtain the optimal design parameters that are dynamically feasible at low economic costs. Each process constraint and the cost function are represented using PSE approximations. The key benefit of this methodology is the significant reduction in the computational costs associated with running multiple simulations to calculate optimum design under process disturbances and parameter uncertainty.

Thesis: Integration of Design and Control under Uncertainty: A New Back-off Approach using PSE Approximations