Development of a low cost thermal feedback system for basic control education

Temperature is a very important industrial parameter and there is a lot of literature available on temperature control. In this paper, we have presented an experimental setup for temperature control of thermal systems. The electronics includes the firing - angle control circuitry to control the AC power to the filament bulb acting as a heating element. The system is identified as first order using the step response method. Different experiments like on-off control, PID control and digital control have been performed on this setup and the experimental results match with the simulation results. This experimental setup is interfaced with the MATLAB using the DAQ card. A GUI is developed in the MATLAB to make this setup user friendly, providing option like gain setting, anti-windup compensator enable/disable, selection of controller type, selection of sampling time etc. The purpose of this paper is to develop a low cost setup to demonstrate control concepts on a thermal system.