The control of a drinking-water treatment plant aims to produce the correct quantity of water, with a constant quality. Achieving constant water quality is not an obvious task, since the online water-quality measurements and possible control actions are limited. Applying model-based control improves disturbance rejection and online process optimisation. For the softening process step, the integ...

Optimal control has wide applications for the control of batch and semi-batch processes to develop an optimum control input policy by extremizing a performance measure. The deployment of optimal control relies heavily on the accuracy of the process models being used for computation of the optimal profile. Often, the process models do not replicate the plants due to various shortcomings such as ...

Agrobacterium tumefaciens can cause crown gall tumors on a wide range of host plants. As a natural genetic engineer, the bacterium can transfer both single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) [transferred DNA (T-DNA)] molecules and bacterial virulence proteins into various recipient cells. Among Agrobacterium-delivered proteins, VirE2 is an ssDNA binding protein that is involved in various steps of the transf...

In process design practice the plant piping and instrumentation diagram evolves iteratively using mainly experience and process reasoning to address questions related to plant controllability. It would be desirable to be able to address such questions more quantitatively at di erent abstraction levels during process design such that controllability evaluation can be integrated into the design p...

The issues of stochastically varying network delays and packet dropouts in Networked Control System (NCS) applications have been simultaneously addressed by time domain optimal tuning of fractional order (FO) PID controllers. Different variants of evolutionary algorithms are used for the tuning process and their performances are compared. Also the effectiveness of the fractional order PI(λ)D(μ)...

Energy is the largest variable operating cost after raw materials for most of the process industries and its efficient use is key to sustaining profitable operation. Natural gas is the most common incremental fossil fuel and its general increase in price and in price volatility over the past few years are well known with most experts projecting these trends to continue in the future. Table 1 gi...