A PACT with C&I suppliers
15 Jan 2000
The University of Sheffield has opened a process control laboratory designed to help postgraduate students come to grips with up-to-date control equipment. The lab is part of the PACT (Partnership in Automation and Control Training) scheme, set up by Sheffield and Newcastle Universities.
PACT cost over £240000, half of which was provided by Eurotherm Process Automation and Honeywell Control Systems, which are members of the scheme. Of the remainder, £100000 was provided by the University, and £20000 came from the EPSRC.
The laboratory will contain five pilot plant rigs, of which four are complete. Each is designed around a single unit operation or process desorption, humidification, neutralising, blending, converging and distillation are all featured. The control and monitoring equipment is state-of-the-art and is configured as it would be on a normal industrial plant.
Students will use the plant to gain experience of a range of control strategies, including three-term PID, feed-forward, multi-loop and sequential, as well as advanced techniques like fuzzy logic and model-based predictive control.
