Dr Sirish Shah
Dr Sirish Shah
Computer Process Control
Dr Sirish Shah is a new iCORE Industrial Chair award awardee ($500K).
He receives NSERC funding ($1.1M), cash and in-kind contributions from
Suncor and Matrikon ($1.15M) and University of Alberta contributions
($117K).
Research Program Overview
In refining, petrochemical, pulp and paper, and mineral processing
industries, unexpected disruptions to processing plant operations are a
major cause of additional costs and poor quality product. Most
disruptions are due to common faults that are seldom detected early
enough to avoid major challenges. However, if the data from the
process’ several-hundred variables are analyzed in real-time, then
operators can engage in predictive maintenance and prevent costly
disruptions, off-grade product, and environmental damage.
Dr Shah’s research is focused on developing tools for industry that
allow predictive maintenance and demonstrating the utility of these
tools to industry. These tools are being applied to refining,
petrochemical, pulp and paper, and mineral processing industries for
companies such as Matrikon Consulting Ltd. and Suncor, that are already
supporting Dr Shah.
Dr Shah’s research benefits operations that utilize Multivariate
Statistical Process Control means (e.g. coker monitoring, tower
flooding monitoring, reactor de-composition, and furnace coking), has
interest in process improvements, and is open to Industrial-Academic
collaborations.
Dr Shah’s research interests lie in the development of new-time and
frequency-domain methods for real-time, application-driven, closed-loop
monitoring of industrial processes.
Research activity focuses in the area of temporal and spectral methods
for analyzing process data, and isolation methods (that will be able to
deal with missing and non-uniformly sampled data) for the purpose of
fault detection and diagnosis.
Biographical Information
Dr Shah received his BSc degree in control engineering from Leeds
University in 1971, his MSc degree in automatic control from UMIST,
Manchester in 1972, and his PhD degree in process control (chemical
engineering) from the University of Alberta in 1976.
Since 2001, Dr Shah has worked to establish a centre of research
excellence in Intelligent Systems and Control. He has held visiting
appointments at Oxford University and Ballol College as a Science and
Engineering Research Council fellow, United Kingdom, in 1985-86, at
Kumamoto University Japan as a senior research fellow of the Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science in 1994, and at the University of
Newcastle, Australia, in 2004. He became an iCORE Chair in 2006.
Related Links:
Dr Sirish Shah’s Homepage
NSERC
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