Acknowledgments

A few acknowledgments are in order. First of all, Professor Jim Turpin at the University of Arkansas stimulated my interest in process dynamics and control when I took his course as an undergraduate. As a neophyte process engineer for American Petrofina I had the opportunity to serve as a process operator during two work-stoppages. A newfound respect for control loop interaction led me to graduate study at the University of Texas, where Professor Tom Edgar provided the "degrees of freedom" for me to explore a range of control topics. Collaborations at Merck, Inc., led to the presentation of modeling and control of batch reactors in Module 11. Research sponsored by the Whitaker Foundation and the National Science Foundation resulted in material presented in Modules 12 and 14.

My own graduate students have served as teaching assistants in the dynamics and control courses, and have provided me with valuable feedback on various versions of this textbook. In particular, Lou Russo, now at ExxonMobil, helped me understand what works and what does not work in the classroom and in homework assignments. He certainly had a major positive impact on the education of many Rensselaer undergraduates.

Professor Robert Parker at the University of Pittsburgh classroom tested this textbook, and made a number of valuable suggestions. In addition, Brian Aufderheide (now at the Keck Graduate Institute) critiqued Chapter 16.

My colleagues at Rensselaer have promoted an environment that provides an optimum mix of teaching and research; our department has published four textbooks during the past two years. Various educational initiatives at Rensselaer have allowed me to develop an interactive learning approach to dynamics and control. In particular, the Control Engineering Studio environment gives me immediate feedback on the level of practical understanding on a particular topic and allows me to give immediate feedback to students. A Curriculum Innovation grant from P&G led to the development of experiments and learning modules for the dynamics and control course, and for other courses using the Control Engineering Studio classroom.

Various Troy and Albany establishments have served to "gain schedule" my personal regulatory system and allowed me to obtain a better understanding of the pharma cokinetics and pharmacodynamics of caffeine and ethanol. The Daily Grind (www.dailygrind.com; you won't find a better coffee roaster in Seattle) in Albany provided beans for the many espressos that "kick started" numerous sections of this textbook. Group meetings at the Troy Pub & Uncle Sam Brewery (www.troypub.com; try the Harwood Porter the next time you are in town) led to many interesting education and research^[2] discussions (not to mention political and other topics).

^[2] The important interplay of research and education should not be overlooked. Seemingly innocuous problems assigned in the control class have led to interesting graduate research projects. Similarly, graduate research results have been brought into the undergraduate classroom.

Naturally, completing this text would have been a struggle without the support of my wife, Pat Fahy, and the good sleeping habits of my kids, Brendan and Eileen. They have done their best to convince me that not all systems are controllable.