COM4LAB: Control Loops and Stability

The COM4LAB course entitled “Control Loops and Stability” is the second course on the control engineering. The basic concepts and laws of the control loops are explained and practically devised using a number of experiments. The course comprises 10 chapters.

Total duration: Up to 8 hours

Target audience

Among others, the course can be used to support the training process for the following professions and subjects of study:

• electronics technician for automation technology
• electronics technician for energy and building technology
• electronics technician for devices and systems
• electronics technician for information and system technology
• electronics technician for machine and drive technology
• aircraft electronics technician
• automation technology (bachelor's studies)
• control engineering (bachelor's studies)

Learning objectives

The students are to:

• be able to understand the basic principle of control loops and the evaluation of control loops (stability, performance criteria),
• be able to understand the implementation of controllers for real technical controlled systems and
• be able to understand the fault identification in control loops.

Topics

The course covers the following topics:

• stability of automatic control systems
• performance criteria for automatic control loops
• optimisation guideliness for PID controllers
• controller design according to Ziegler/Nichols
• automatic temperature control
• automatic speed control
• automatic light control
• automatic control of controlled systems without compensation
• automatic control with discontinuous controllers
• fault simulation

Previous knowledge

The students need to have a basic knowledge of electronic components and of control engineering (COM4LAB Course: Introduction to Control Engineering) in order to be able to complete the course successfully. Additionally, dealing with simple formulas is required.