ECE 429

Control Systems Laboratory

Introduction:
The faculty supervisor for this course is Dr. Beale, Room 257, Science and Technology II, 993-1596. His office hours are shown on his homepage. The GTA will be responsible for providing assistance to the students during the lab and during his/her office hours. The GTA will also be responsible for all grading in the lab, and will set standards for the grading. The weighting of the various experiments will be based on the number of weeks assigned to the experiments.

Objectives:
The objective of this laboratory is to enable the students to strengthen their understanding of the design and analysis of control systems through practical exercises. This will be accomplished by using modern software resources to analyze and simulate the performance of realistic system models and to design control systems to satisfy various performance specifications.

Overview:
The control systems laboratory consists of three separate units. Each unit consists of several experiments. Unit A involves analysis and controller design for a fairly simple system model. Unit B involves the design and analysis for a much more realistic system, involving disturbances and varying parameters. Unit C involves compensator design for a system involving pure time delay. Students in the lab will be divided into groups of two students each. Students will document each experiment with a description of their procedures, results of their analysis or design, and plots as appropriate. The reports for the various experiments within a particular set will be turned in to the GTA at one time when the set is completed.

Unit A -- 3 weeks:
This set of experiments is intended to provide students with a review of standard control system design techniques for a fairly simple single-block system. Gain compensation is used initially, and then dynamic compensators, such as phase lead or phase lag, are used to satisfy certain performance requirements. Requirements are given in both the time domain and frequency domain.
Unit A.1, Unit A.2, Unit A.3

Unit B -- 5 weeks:
This set of experiments is intended to introduce students to the design of control systems for realistic applications. Tension control is an important function in film finishing machines. A movable dancer roll is used to maintain constant tension in the film as it is pulled through the machine. To function properly, the dancer roll must not be allowed to exceed its maximum allowable position limits. The position of the dancer roll must be kept near its center of travel in the face of disturbances acting on the system. These experiments will involve the design of a control system which will satisfy certain performance objectives in the face of varying parameter values and external disturbances.
Unit B.1, Unit B.2, Unit B.3

Unit C -- 4 weeks:
The transfer function which is to be used in this set of experiments arises during the study of control system design of first-order systems which have pure time delays in them and the purpose of the controller is to work with different values of time delay. This turns out to be equivalent to another control problem, namely designing a compensator which works with a particular transfer function representing a "fictitious" system. The system to be controlled in this set of experiments is the fictitious system, and part of the set will involve investigating the dependence of the value of the time delay on the characteristics of the compensator.
Unit C.1, Unit C.2, Unit C.3

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Latest revision on Thursday, June 8, 2006 9:40 AM