Opportunities and challenges for process control in process intensification

This is a review and position article discussing the role and prospective for process control in process intensification. Firstly, the article outlines the classical role of control in process systems, presenting an overview of control systems’ development, from basic PID control to the advanced model based hierarchical structures. Further on, the paper reviews the research articles discussing control issues of intensified process equipment, specifically of reactive distillation, divided wall distillation, simulated moving bed reactors and micro-scale systems. In the next section, the focus is on more fundamental, dynamic characteristics of selected intensified process categories, which are elucidated in several examples. The goal of this analysis is to stress to the potential challenges for control of intensified processes. More importantly, the aim of this part is to emphasize to the opportunities for control, which are associated with new actuation possibilities arising from process intensification. Finally, a new concept of process synthesis is elaborated, which is based on process intensification and actuation improvement. The concept enables integration of process operation, design and control through dynamic optimization. This simultaneous synthesis approach should provide optimal operation and more efficient control of complex intensified systems. It may also suggest innovative process solutions which are more economically and environmentally efficient and agile.