Teaching Interests

Rob’s teaching assignments typically leverage his applied background.  With the exception of a two-year hiatus in 2001-2002, Rob has teamed with Prof. Jan Wagner to teach our two-semester senior design capstone courses, Chemical Engineering Design I and II (CHE 4124 and 4224) every year since 1992.  His course load also typically includes one course a year in process control.  The graduate level control course he teaches is offered as a distance education course with an enrollment that normally includes about eight practicing engineers at different locations throughout the US.  Rob is a past recipient of the OSU Regents Distinguished Teaching award.

Research Interests:

Process Monitoring/Control/Optimization; Distillation; Ethanol Separation for Biofuels

Rob is currently involved in projects in three different areas.  One involves investigation of appropriate methods to determine economic values of intermediate product streams used in the objective function of APC (advanced process control) multivariable controllers.  The work involves a combination of control and LP optimization concepts at the interface between theory and practice.

Rob and his students are also working in the area of distillation in collaboration with the technical staff at Fractionation Research, Inc. (FRI).  Located on the OSU campus, FRI (www.fri.org) is a non-profit research consortium supported by memberships which include the largest petroleum and petrochemical companies in the world.  FRI’s technical staff is deemed to be the preeminent group of researchers in the field of distillation throughout the entire international community.  Rob and his students are currently investigating hydraulic state estimation from high speed pressure and Dp measurements and the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for analysis and design of distillation column components.

Rob and his students are also collaborating with researchers in OSU’s School of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering (BAE) in the area of biofuels.  Specifically, Rob’s group is investigating methods to perform on-farm dewatering of ethanol produced from sweet sorghum.  This effort involves evaluation of traditional distillation as a benchmark as well as other separation techniques including pervaporation.  “Sorganol” represents an alternative to  starch (e.g., corn) and cellulosic (e.g., switchgrass) based methods of producing bioethanol.       

Recent Papers

Xie, F. and J.R. Whiteley, “Model predictive control of a geothermally heated bridge deck,” Paper # ThA03.1, Proceedings of the 2007 American Control Conference, New York City, 2007.

Arjunan, Jeyarathan and J.R. Whiteley, “Generating tiered intermediate product prices for APC using a refinery LP,” preprint, Paper #442c, AIChE 2007 Annual Mtg., Salt Lake City, 2007.

Vennavelli, A. and J.R. Whiteley, “Error band identification and characterization for APC performance assessment,” preprint, Paper #57b, AIChE 2007 Spring Mtg., Houston, 2007.

Whiteley, J.R. and J. Wagner, “Industrial collaboration in the capstone design courses: experiences at Oklahoma State University,” preprint, Paper #538f, AIChE 2006 Annual Mtg., San Francisco, 2006.

Whiteley, J.R., “Potential use of advanced process control for safety purposes during attack of a process plant,” Journal of Hazardous Materials, Vol. 130, pp. 42-47, 2006.

Whiteley, J.R. and J. Wagner, “Process threat management case study,” Process Safety Progress, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 279-283, 2004.

Whiteley, J.R., M.S. Mannan and S.J. Brouillard, “Initial perspectives on process threat management,” Journal of Hazardous Materials, Vol. 115, pp. 163-167, 2004.

Li, Qing, J.R. Whiteley and R.R. Rhinehart, “An automated performance monitor for process controllers,” Control Engineering Practice, Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 537-553, 2004.