It also affects the choice of control valve trim and the feedforward design. The understanding of these relationships does not require a degree in chemical engineering but presumes just some understanding of common terms (e.g. heat transfer coefficient and area), relationships (e.g. ideal gas law), and physical concepts (e.g. conservation of mass and energy).
Equations have been developed from first principle relationships for the process gains, dead times, and time constants of volumes with various degrees of mixing. The results show that for well mixed volumes with negligible injection delays, the effect of flow cancels out for the controller gain if one of the following methods is used: Lambda self-regulating rule where Lambda is set equal to the dead time, or the reaction curve method.
