The satisfaction in engineering for me is the application of science to the problems of everyday life. As I alluded earlier, statements of purpose evolve. In my first year of graduate studies I applied for several fellowships. Since I knew now what research I wanted to do I wrote a more specific essay. Polymers were out, chemical process control was in.
Chemical engineers design, construct, and operate chemical processes.
Whether these processes are as simple as a cooling jacket on a reactor, or as complex as an entire chemical plant, they require process control technology to insure that they operate safely, efficiently, and cost effectively. This is because traditional control techniques, when applied to large scale processes, have too much on-line computational load and tend to produce nonsensical results due to numerical inaccuracies which arise from the large scale, poorly conditioned nature of these processes. Limited input-output data exacerbates the difficulty in controlling these processes, since models developed from these data will be inaccurate. Linear control design techniques are not applicable, due to nonlinearities and the wide range of operating conditions which commonly occur in chemical processes, and to limitations on the control equipment and process operating conditions. For these reasons, the analysis and control of large scale processes are among the most important, challenging, and interesting problems in process systems theory and control.