Jim Henry

International co-operation in control engineering education using online experiments

This paper describes the international co-operation experience in teaching control engineering with laboratories being conducted remotely by students via the Internet. This paper describes how the students ran the experiments and their personal experiences with the laboratory. A tool for process identification and controller tuning based on spreadsheets like MS-Excel is outlined. Process identification and modelling can be carried out for the open- and closed-loop control circuit. Controller tuning is done according to the criterion of cascaded damping ratios. The design is based on a direct relation between the parameters of the process and the controller. Tuning for optimal set-point control as well as disturbance rejection is provided.