Dale Smith, Ph.D - President/Senior Control Engineer
At APCO Inc., Dale has the pleasure of directing some of the brightest minds and finest people ever assembled in the field of process control. He has been working within the industry since 1985 in the area of regulatory, advanced control, and optimization. In 1995 he founded APCO and targeted regulatory and advanced control improvements in the heavy industries.
Dale has over thirty years of experience in control technology. He has implemented advanced control systems in many places around the world including Japan, Germany, Norway, and India. He now oversees various projects based primarily within the United States.
Process units include:
- Fluid Catalytic Cracking and Gas Recovery
- Fractionation/Distillation
- Absorption
- Ethylene Furnaces
- Caprolactum
- Isomerization (UOP Penex)
- Dewaxing Reactors
- Nodulizing and Calcining Rotary Kilns
- Ethylene Refrigeration systems
- Glass Annealing Lehr
- PH controls
- Many others
Control technologies include:
- Optimizing constrained, multivariable controllers (DMCplus, SMCA)
- Constraint control
- Adaptive PID
- Nonlinear multivariable identification
- Multivariable inferred properties for crude unit quality measurements
Programming Languages include:
- FORTRAN
- BASIC
- Matlab
- ACSL
- Associated DCS languages
Dale has experience with a wide variety of DCS systems including:
- IBM ACS, Yokagowa Centum
- Fisher Provox
- Bailey Net 90
- Honeywell TDC 2000 – 3000
- HP-A900 PMC-1000
- OPTO-22
Professional Highlights
APCO Inc. - President and CEO of Advanced Process Control and Optimization consulting company. He leads and manages advanced control projects in many industries.
SETPOINT Inc. (purchased by Aspen Technology) - Senior Project Engineer - Participated in designing, programming, and implementing multivariable model predictive control and optimization strategies.
Kirtland AFB Weapons Laboratory - Engineering assistant in chief scientist lab - One and two dimensional laser beam profiling and computer interfacing of silicon detectors.
University of Utah - Involved in the Control Program of the Chemical Engineering department. Dale also helped develop, as well as taught at, The Teaching Center for Advanced Control Technology. He taught DCS courses, regulatory, and advanced control short courses to hundreds of industrial clients.
Brigham Young University - Instructor - Taught graduate-level applied digital process control courses and an undergraduate-level FORTRAN programming course.
When Dale is not working he enjoys motorcycling, fishing, and spending time with his wife and children.