Design and development of a flexible control laboratory plant for educational purposes

Theory and practice in control education come together into hands-on laboratories. Control laboratories are commonly composed by a set of didactical plants (typically plants of liquid level control in tanks, temperature control, speed and position control in motors, among others) on which students perform the practical experiences required by the teaching staff. However, given that these plants usually have a fixed structure (normally first or second order models), the creation of control learning activities for different type and order plants are not possible. In this context, this paper presents a flexible educational plant which has been designed as a set of electronic modules based on operational amplifiers which can be combined to create different transfer functions (or plants) and perform PID control on it. This plant is accompanied by a data acquisition system that allows sending and receiving signals to and from the modules and visualizing the results through a graphical user interface developed in LabVIEW. The application also includes an additional tool to compare simulated and real responses for analysis and validation purposes of the designed controllers.