David Koenig - Practical Control Engineering: A Guide for Engineers, Managers, and Practitioners

Practical Control Engineering

About the Author

David M. Koenig had a 27 year career in process control and analysis for Corning, Inc., retiring as an Engineering Associate. His education started at the University of Chicago in chemistry, leading to a PhD in chemical engineering at The Ohio State University. He resides in upstate New York where his main job is providing day care for his six month old grandson.

A Guide for Engineers, Managers, and Practitioners

David M. Koenig

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To Joshua Lucas, Ryan, Jennifer, Denise,
Julie and Bertha and
in memory of Wilda and Rudy.

You may be an engineering student, a practicing engineer working with control engineers, or even a control engineer. But I am going to assume that you are a manager.

Managers of control engineers sometimes have a difficult challenge. Many companies promote top managerial prospects laterally into unfamiliar technical areas to broaden their outlook. A manager in this situation often will have several process control engineers reporting directly to her and she needs an appreciation for their craft. Alternatively, technical project managers frequently supervise the work of process control engineers on loan from a department specializing in the field. This book is designed to give these managers insight into the work of the process control engineers working for them. It can also give the student of control engineering an alternative and complementary perspective.

Consider the following scenario. A sharp control engineer, who either works for you or is working on a project that you are managing, has just started an oral presentation about his sophisticated approach to solving a knotty control problem. What do you do? If you are a successful manager, you have clearly convinced (perhaps without foundation) many people of your technical competence so you can probably ride through this presentation without jeopardizing your managerial prestige. However, you will likely want to actually critique his presentation carefully. This could be a problem since, being a successful manager, you are juggling several technically diverse balls in the air and havent the time to research the technological underpinnings of each. Furthermore, your formal educational background may not be in control engineering. The above-mentioned control engineer, embarking on his presentation, is probably quite competent but perhaps he has been somewhat enthralled by the elegance of his approach and has missed the forest for the trees (it certainly happened to me many times over the years). You should be able to ask some penetrating questions or make some key suggestions that will get him on track and make him (and you) more successful. Hopefully, you will pick up a few hints on the kind of questions to ask while reading this book.

The fundamental stumbling block in understanding process control engineering is its languageapplied mathematics. I could attempt to skirt the issue with a qualitative book on control engineering. Not only is this difficult to do but it would not really equip the manager to effectively interact with and supervise the process control engineer. To do this, the manager simply has to understand (and speak) the language.

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