CPACT CELEBRATES 20 YEARS AND LOOKS TO THE FUTURE
In October this year the Centre for Process Analysis and Control Technology (CPACT) marked their 20th Anniversary with a 2-day Conference and celebratory dinner at their home base, Strathclyde University in Glasgow. Process analysis and control is a key technology area for the petroleum and petrochemical industries and CPACT are keen to develop further links with the industry as they continue to grow the scope of the technologies and expertise they can offer to member organisations. In this article we look at what CPACT has to offer the industry.
developed with other interested industrial and academic parties and led to the formation of CPACT in July 1997 with funding from the UK government through the Foresight Challenge of £1.34m plus industrial contributions of £669,000 in cash and circa £2m in-kind contributions.
One of the Founders of CPACT, Prof David Littlejohn (left) and Dan Wood CEO of member company Keit Spectrometers in deep discussion at the CPACT 20th Anniversary meeting in Strathclyde University. Photo courtesy of Natalie Kerr, CPACT
Who are CPACT?
The concept of CPACT was developed during discussions in the mid 1990s between Prof David Littlejohn from Strathclyde University, who was interested in on-line process analysis, and Prof Julian Morris from Newcastle University, who was interested in process control technologies. These discussions were further
Founding members included the Universities of Strathclyde, Newcastle and Hull together with 9 end-user and vendor companies who launched CPACT as a UK based, inter-disciplinary consortium to promote advanced process monitoring and control technologies. Through the last 20 years CPACT has grown and developed into a successful self-sustaining international organisation delivering process analysis and control technology collaborations between academia, vendors and end-user companies (Figure 1).
A major feature of the CPACT model is a unique confi dentiality agreement and modus operandi between universities and collaborating companies, which is designed so that new members can sign up “quickly and easily”, and which includes a ‘Proprietary Project’ Annex.
CPACT now includes 29 industrial members and 12 University and Research Centres and has a track record of delivering value added projects. The current members are listed by category in Table 1. Members estimate that CPACT have brought over £60m in benefi ts
through projects which have included petrochemical processes such as catalytic cracking, catalyst recycling (£0.25m per annum), fl uidised bed optimisation (£1m per annum), reaction monitoring in both batch and continuous processes and unexplained variability in fermentation processes (£4.5m per annum).
What Does CPACT Do?
The main mission of CPACT is to deliver research and technology transfer (Figure 2) in process analytics, process monitoring, process modelling, process control and chemometrics by providing a “one stop shop” for companies seeking advice and research on all aspects of process control. By combining leading universities with technology vendors working in conjunction with the end user companies, CPACT provides an excellent window on the world of process control and chemical analysis.
The research is focussed on industry led projects and provides routes to tangible scientifi c and technological benefi ts in process manufacturing. CPACT addresses the manufacturing challenges being faced by the chemical, biochemical, pharmaceutical, food and materials processing industries through the unique synergy of end-user process manufacturers, analytical vendor companies and control systems solution providers.
Key research areas and technologies which can be accessed by members of CPACT include: -
Process Analytics:
The main process analytical research is based in Strathclyde University and focusses on the development of at-line, on-line, in-line and non-invasive process monitoring procedures for specifi c applications based on a wide range of techniques combined with chemometric data analysis and the development of miniaturised ‘bespoke’ process sensors.
Optical spectroscopy techniques are widely employed on-line in the petroleum industries and CPACT expertise in this area includes near and mid infra-red, ultra violet and raman spectroscopy which are often combined with chemometric and advanced statistical data processing techniques to provide “real time” chemical process analysis data. The academic expertise is also supplemented by several vendor members supplying leading edge hardware and software
Low Field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (LFNMR) techniques are currently of interest in the petroleum industry and are being studied by CPACT for process analysis. In addition to deploying commercially available LFNMR bench top instrumentation CPACT has secured a recent research award to develop Very Low Field NMR which has the potential to deliver a paradigm shift for LFNMR spectroscopy for industrial process monitoring, control, and optimisation.
Figure 1: The CPACT technology collaboration model between academia, vendors and end-user companies. Courtesy CPACT
Acoustic spectroscopy, both in passive and active modes, is a powerful non-invasive tool for process analysis and CPACT has signifi cant expertise and an active research programme in this area. Other areas include on-line mass spectrometry, data fusion, smart chemometrics and signal processing.
ANNUAL BUYERS GUIDE 2018 •
WWW.PETRO-ONLINE.COM
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100
