These two courses are intended to introduce rolling mill engineers to control engineering, particularly where it relates to product quality and throughput improvements. The courses introduce mill operations but the majority of the material concerns control engineering, emphasising the different control systems employed on both current and state-of-the-art rolling mills. The major control loops, such as the strip thickness and flatness controls, will be analysed.

Most currently prevailing control loops are of a classical type: a combination of basic PID-feedback, feed-forward, cascade loops and logic. The potential benefits of using modern multivariable control will be discussed, although for this course the concepts of advanced control will be introduced intuitively.

Many leading international companies in metals processing will contribute to the courses.

This course involves a mixture of basic tutorials, practical sessions and presentations on more advanced topics. Refresher material on basic control engineering will be provided and a range of topics will be covered from system identification to signal processing. The benefits that advanced control and systems engineering tools can bring, ranging from economic to reliability improvements, will also be introduced.

The application areas to be covered will include: combined cycle power plants, automatic voltage regulators, bus-bars and distribution system control and stability. Some of the advanced topics to be covered will include robust control, predictive control, fault monitoring and detection, expert systems, intelligent control and data mining.

Very experienced industrial personnel together with leading researchers will present the course. An extensive set of lecture notes will be provided and the examples from the practical sessions will be made available on computer disks.