Chemical Process Dynamics and Controls

Reviewed by Jeffrey Phillips, Assistant Professor, Hanover College on 2/18/19

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

This book is 1400 pages long, so it covers a lot of material. In fact, you can to go more than 500 pages into the book to find coverage on Chemical Process Dynamics and Control. The table of contents alone is 30 pages long. In reality this book also covers statistics, instrumentation, and piping and instrumentation diagram (P&IDs) in a fairly comprehensive fashion. However, the book does not have any homework problems, meaning if you used this as a course textbook, you would have to create all of the homework problems yourself, and it does not have an index.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

While I did not review the entire 1400 pages, the sections I did read appeared to be accurate and unbiased.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 1

90% of the links I tried were dead. This includes all of the links to on-line lectures and most of the links to industrial or governmental websites.

Clarity rating: 2

The prose is written in a manner that most engineers could understand it. However, there is a problem with the sequence of the chapters. The chapters on the different types of instrumentation refer to control techniques that are not covered until you go 500 pages further into the book. It would see where this would cause problems for most students.

Consistency rating: 3

In the sections I reviewed, the text was consistent.

Modularity rating: 5

If anything this book is too modular. It comes across as a compendium of notes from various courses that have been merged into one document.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 2

As I mentioned previously, sequencing is definitely a problem. Control concepts are cited in the first 500 pages of the book, but are not explained to the reader until you get 500 pages further into the text.

Interface rating: 2

The equations in this book are all a bit fuzzy looking. They appear to have been copied and pasted from other documents with too little resolution. Also, many of the figures also suffer from too few pixels. Today's students would not like it.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I did not find any grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

I did not see anything of concern.

Comments

This book could serve as a good reference for a number of topics including instrumentation, statistics, P&IDs and process control. However, it really would not make a good undergraduate level textbook for many of the reasons I have cited above.