Welcome to the PSE Group Homepage!

The Process Systems Engineering Group develops its activity within the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Institute for Systems and Robotics of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto.

Process Systems Engineering (PSE) is today a well established scientific area, appropriately defined as being concerned with the development of methods and computer-based tools for an integrated approach to all aspects of modelling, simulation, design, operation, control and management for the process industries.

This is a highly interdisciplinary area where complementary knowledge from different disciplines is put together - from chemical engineering and electrical engineering, to applied mathematics and basic sciences (physics, chemistry, microbiology…), together with today's major need and contribution of computing technology.

The Process Systems Engineering Group at ISR-Porto recognizes its work in a number of clusters of interest within such a wide and relevant fundamental and applied area. More specifically, the Group has now been working for more than fifteen years on problems concerning process modelling and identification, optimisation, monitoring, and control both at laboratory and industrial scale.

At industrial level projects have been developed  concerning the modelling and operation of industrial evaporation units, crystallisation units (both in a sugar refinery), penicillin production and cyclonic dedusters. At laboratory/pilot scale we are working with crystallisation and precipitation processes, with baker's yeast fermentation and cyclonic dedusters.

A relevant line of work is kept concerning  procedures for global optimisation, mainly the development of stochastic algorithms for large-scale non-linear programming (NLP) and mixed-integer programming (MINLP) problems.

Much attention has been given in recent years to model based methodologies for on-line state estimation, process monitoring and process control. The group has been developing methods of knowledge engineering and software tools for process hybrid modelling, optimisation and control, and ultimately for on-line optimising control.

Also, we are currently concentrating our efforts in developing a Laboratory Environment for teaching, for operator training and for testing of research proposals, concerning process dynamics and control.

May we invite you to surf all the other modules in this site. Please learn about our capacities and research interests,  our current projects and contracts and, in broad terms, our products of work - publications, theses produced, patents, software...and, be sure that we would very much welcome your contact!

This page is maintained by P. Martins       
Last on 26-01-2004       
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