Award Lecture: Process Control: From the Classical to the Postmodern Era
Authors
Thomas F. Edgar
University of Texas
Abstract
No abstract available.
Author Biography
Thomas F. Edgar, University of Texas
Professor Thomas F. Edgar presented this, the Thirty-Fourth Annual Union Carbide Lecture A ward of the Chemical Engineering Division of ASEE at its annual meeting in June of 1996. The purpose of the award is to recognize and encourage outstanding achievement in an important field of fundamental chemical engineering theory or practice.
Professor Edgar is the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Chair in Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. He received his BS in chemical engineering from the University of Kansas and his PhD from Princeton University.
For the past twenty-five years, Professor Edgar has concentrated his academic work in process modeling, control, and optimization. He has published over 200 articles and book chapters in the above fields applied to separations, chemical reactors, coal combustion and gasification, and microelectronics manufacturing. He has supervised the thesis research of over 41 MS and 43 PhD students.
In the field of process control, Professor Edgar's work has focused on multivari able control and adaptive control. He has made important contributions to the modeling and control of linear and nonlinear systems and pioneered the use of nonlinear programming in controller design and data reconciliation, based on the combined use of collocation and optimization. This eventually led to experimental demonstrations of new model-predictive control algorithms on a commercial-scale packed-bed distillation column and rapid thermal processing in microelectronics manufacturing.
Professor Edgar has served in many national professional capacities over the years and is presently President of AIChE. He was founding general editor of the technical journal, In Situ, and has participated on six editorial boards and five university advisory committees. He has coauthored several textbooks, one of which, Process Dynamics and Control received the 1990 ASEE Meriam-Wiley Award as the top engineering textbook.
