8 Years of Experience in Teaching Process Dynamics and Control with Control Station® Software

The paper describes all the steps of a teaching activity dealing with Process Dynamics and Control and focused on the students’ use of the Control Station® simulation software. After a short software description, the paper discusses the methodology developed for coupling theoretical lecturing and practical PC-lab class, the way of involving students and the use of an interactive software environment to present automatic control of illustrative process plants. These latter comprise unit operations and simple equipment from chemical, biochemical, pharmaceutical and food industries as actual examples of abstract systems and mathematical formalisms introduced for studying processes in the context of dynamics and control. Two Project Works, which were developed by students using Control Station® and discussed by them, are presented as examples. The outcome of this 8-year teaching experience is analyzed on the basis of the number of Project Works annually delivered, the auto-evaluation tests, the final exam scores as well as the relevant answers yearly provided by the students through the Course Evaluation Forms. The final statistical results are positive.