Modeling Technical Systems

 
Lecturer: Prof. Alexander Mitsos, Ph.D., Dr.-Ing. Manuel Dahmen
Contact:
Lecture: 2 hrs
Tutorials: 1 hrs
Course schedule: Please get them from the Course calendar RWTH Online
Lecture notes: Available on Moodle
Semester: Summerterm
Language: English
Exam: Written Exam

Model-based techniques like simulation and optimization are becoming increasingly more important in the process and energy industries. Therefore, the subject of this course is the systematic modeling of stationary and dynamic processes, and the analysis of their behavior using numerical and analytical methods.

The following topics are treated:

  • Modeling in energy and chemical engineering: systematic derivation of the balance equations for mass, energy and momentum, and methodologies for model development for special processes in energy and chemical engineering
  • Foundations of systems engineering: system definition, system properties, aggregation, decomposition, hierarchies of systems, methods of system design
  • Formalizing the modeling process: methods of structuring complex energy and chemical engineering processes, description of the physical and chemical phenomena using balance equations, and identification of the main modeling steps
  • Analysis of stationary and dynamic models
  • Exploration of the methods using example reaction and separation processes

The lecture is a compulsory lecture for chemical engineering. It can also be taken by other students, for instance from the CES or Simulation Sciences programmes. The lecture is offered in the summer term. The fundamentals of heat transfer, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, chemical reaction engineering, and thermal separation processes are prerequisites for this course. While in those courses specialized balances and constitutive equations have already been introduced, a structured and systems oriented approach is used to formulate these balances in this course. In this way, the inner relationship between the balances introduced so far is clarified. Furthermore, this course presents methods for analysis with respect to the solvability of the developed equation systems.