Jonathan Whitley

Background

About Jonathan Whitley

Starting in 2019 after graduating from Auburn University with a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering degree, I began as a production engineer at Ascend Performance Materials. Here I worked on projects to improve process yields, increase production capacities, and enhance the safety of plant operations, while quickly learning and developing skills. After just 11 months, I quickly moved into the operations team as a manufacturing engineer in 2020, taking on the additional responsibilities and accountability of running a process unit. I acted as the process owner for the reaction, distillation, and byproduct separation systems of the Adipic Acid processing unit. This provided me direct experience in a wide variety of unit operations including pumps and heat exchangers, compressors, reactors, distillation, ion exchange, crystallization and centrifugation, dryers, furnace operation, and inventory managements systems. I gained experience interfacing with every aspect of the business from daily operations, maintenance and reliability, supply chain, ESH, technology, and the commercial teams. In addition, my day-to-day role provided me direct experience with the Emerson DeltaV control system. In 2020, I started gaining direct experience with the DeltaV DCS control system. I learned how to configure and modify control strategies to solve real-world control problems occurring in the process that I managed. In 2021 I led the control system migration project for a cooling tower system, migrating from an older control system to DeltaV, providing configuration and graphics development. In 2022 I started developing my own advanced regulatory control improvements for my own projects in the DeltaV system, implementing new constraint override, cascade, and feedforward control strategies, and I designed and installed a new supervisory controller in DeltaV. Starting in late 2022, I started working on Advanced Process Control, implementing Model Predictive Control strategies in the Adipic unit and elsewhere utilizing the Aspen DMC3 platform, and formally moving into the APC team in 2023. In this role, I gained experience across the site in designing and deploying MPC and advanced regulatory control improvements in many different types of processes and specifying control and instrumentation requirements.