The group

The group presently consists of more than 30 people, in addition to about 10 Master students. The group closely cooperates with other systems-oriented departments at the university, including Engineering Cybernetics and SINTEF. The process systems engineering activity at NTNU (PROST) holds high international standards and was already in 1994 recognized as a strong-point center, both by NTNU and SINTEF.

At present, the main activities in the group are within process control and process modelling including efficient thermodynamic calculations. An active area is systems biology.

Research areas

• Process and plantwide control
• Process modelling
• Systems biology and bioinformatics
• Subsea processing (SUBPRO)

Lab activities

Small-scale experimental rigs have been built to study anti-slug control and novel distillation arrangements. In most cases, control is an "add-on" to enable and improve operation, but the anti-slug rig demonstrates how control in some cases can be used to operate the system in a completely different manner. The Kaibel distillation column is a 6 meter high and 5 cm in diameter and can be used to study "thermally coupled" columns, including the threeproduct Petlyuk column and the four-product Kaibel column (Skogestad). The group also has responsibility for several smaller batch destillation columns which are frequently used for demonstration purposes (Preisig). A new biochemical lab came into operation in 2018/19. It has unique equipment for studying control of such processes, including fermentation (Bar).

Funding

Comes from he Norwegian Research Council, the SUBPRO and HighEFF research programs, from industry and from the EU.