In recent years so-called Port-Hamiltonian systems became popular in the literature. This is mainly due to the passivity properties and the evident system structure of Port-Hamiltonian systems that allow an energy interpretation of this system class. Based on these properties Port-Hamiltonian systems constitute an active research area and several control design methods for Port-Hamiltonian systems have been developed. Especially the Interconnection and Damping Assignment Passivity-Based Control (IDA-PBC) method has been proven to be very successful. In the application of IDA-PBC and other Port-Hamiltonian system techniques to real-world examples so far mainly electro-mechanical systems have been considered, because for those examples Port-Hamiltonian systems are the standard modeling framework. This paper gives an introduction to the framework of Port-Hamiltonian systems and the IDA-PBC design and shows with different examples that it is also applicable in process control. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.