Digital control of a positioning device for a ventilation machine

In this paper a microcontroller based digital control of an industrial application is presented. The positioning control of a ventilator piston in an artificial respiration device will be described. This new device will replace the old ventilator system which uses an analogous controller by a more modern one controlled by a microcontroller. In addition to hardware savings it is possible to get more flexibility of the system, more comfort for the operator and more feedback from the technical process. For this control application a mathematical model of the ventilation system is presented. Based on this model a controller has been designed and tested in simulations. In a further section the software package which has been developed will be presented. To sum up some experimental results will be shown.