A Teaching Laboratory for Process Control

Laboratory teaching is one possibility to introduce more realism into control education. This paper describes the control laboratory and a sequence of experiments that are performed in the basic automatic control courses at Lund Institute of Technology. The laboratory is based on level control of two cascaded tanks. An Apple II computer is used to implement control laws, graphics, and for computer aided instructions. Four labs of successively increasing complexity are performed. They include empirical experimentation with PI and PID control, modeling and parameter fitting, design, implementation and tuning of PID control, antiwindup, auto-tuning, selector control, state feedback, Kalman filtering and output feedback.