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Redway House, East Lane, Merstone, Isle of Wight, PO30 3DJ, United Kingdom | |||||
Founded by Myke King, in 1992, Whitehouse Consulting is an independent consulting organisation specialising in the application of process control technologies. Its expertise covers the full range from basic regulatory controls through to advanced multivariable techniques and closed loop real-time optimisation. It has no connection with any system vendor or installer. Further it does not itself provide proprietary technology. Whitehouse offers a blend of technical, commercial and organisational advice. Recommendations are based on a sound understanding of the business, the available technology and the organisational change necessary to fully exploit the profit improvement potential. Whitehouse's involvement varies from troubleshooting a few poorly performing controllers, through plant-wide control performance audits to full site-wide master plans. Whitehouse aims to form guiding partnerships with its clients taking them from identifying the profit improvement potential through to capturing the benefits in the most cost effective way. Whitehouse provides services throughout the world with its current client base spread over more than 30 countries. Its consultants each have about 35 years of relevant experience. While most of its work is in the oil and petrochemical industries it is active in others such as pulp and paper; food and drink; pharmaceuticals and metals. Indeed its expertise is applicable to most process industries. It also provides services to companies that themselves provide services to these industries - most notably to a wide range of engineering contractors and control system vendors. As part of its consulting activities Whitehouse offers a range of training courses. These cover all the commonly used techniques and are split into modules that can be arranged to meet the needs of its clients. Over 2,500 engineers have attended Whitehouse's courses. The course material is fully supported with software that, on a simulated process, provides valuable hands-on implementation experience for the course participants. Those attending in-company courses retain the software and use it for reference or to train others. It also includes a self-learning program of exercises. Many of Whitehouse's clients have purchased corporate licences to provide access for all staff. A number of process control design support tools have evolved from Whitehouse's consulting assignments. These have been packaged into a low cost toolkit. It includes important control design applications such as dynamic model identification, controller tuning and inferential property development. Specific tools are included to assist with the design of surge vessel capacity control and pressure compensated distillation tray temperature control. The package also provides a range of diagnostic tools such as Fourier transformation, parallel coordinates, control valve linearisation and MPC matrix analysis. An extensive statistics tool supports the engineer in all aspects of controller design and monitoring. Further the Toolkit includes Lagrangian interpolation, a physical property database and an engineering unit conversion utility. Part of this toolkit can be downloaded from this web site to assist the reader in tuning PID controllers. Whitehouse has published a number of articles and newsletters which readers should find helpful in addressing some of the issues key to project success. |