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Guy Dumont, University of British Columbia

Recent advances in paper machine control

A paper machine is a large scale complex process that transforms a very dilute fibre
suspension into a sheet of paper with exacting specifications at speeds sometimes exceeding 120km/h. The direction in which the paper sheet travels is defined as machine direction (MD) and the direction perpendicular to the sheet travel is defined as the cross direction (CD). The control of the sheet’s properties in both directions has been the subject of extensive development for the last five decades or so. In order to further improve the performance of those systems, there is currently a push to develop methods to automatically detect the cause of performance deterioration of model-based paper machine control system, both for the MD and CD processes. This paper will review some of those recent developments.

Presentation slides

 

Biography

Guy A. Dumont received his Diplôme d'Ingénieur from ENSAM, Paris, France in 1973 and his Ph.D., Electrical Engineering from McGill University, Montreal in 1977. In 1973-74, and then again from 1977 to 1979, he worked for Tioxide France. From 1979 to 1989, he was with Paprican.In 1989, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia where he is a Professor.
From 1989 to 1999, he held the Senior NSERC/Paprican Industrial Research Chair in Process Control. Guy Dumont has won various awards including a 1979 IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control Honorable Paper Award; the IEEE Control Systems Society 1998 Control Systems Technology Award and NSERC Synergy Awards, in 1999 for the development of the technology behind Universal Dynamics’ BrainWave adaptive controller, and in 2002 for the development of Honeywell’s Intellimap cross-directional control loop-shaping technology.
His current research interests are: adaptive control, distributed parameter system control, control loop performance monitoring, predictive control, with applications to the process industries, mainly pulp and paper. Recently, he has expanded his interests to biomedical engineering, particularly to biomedical signal processing and automatic drug delivery. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the BC Advanced Systems Institute and a member of ISA, PAPTAC and TAPPI.

 

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