A teaching laboratory for process control

Laboratory experiments offer one way to introduce more realism into the education of automatic control. This paper describes a control laboratory and a sequence of experiments 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 and to provide graphics and computer-aided instruction. Four laboratory experiments 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, autotuning, selector control, state feedback, Kalman filtering, and output feedback.