Proportional - integral - Derivative (PID) control has been especially popular in industrial process like chemical petroleum, power, food and manufacturing industries. These system are usually slow, complex and are characterized by relatively incomplete or incertain mathematical description. The PID controller, parameters of which may be adjusted experimentally, is therefore particularly attractive in such situations.
The experimental unit consists of simulated building blocks like error detector, dead time, integrator and time constant, which may be configured into a variety of systems. A PID section with adjustable proportional gain, derivative and integral time constants provide the control action. Built in set value, square and triangular sources enable the student to study the response on a CRO. The accompanying literature includes system description, theory, experimented procedure and typical results. An important features of the system is that simulated blocks are designed to operate at frequencies suitable for CRO viewing. The effect of controller parameter adjustments are therefore seen immediately. No expensive recorders are required for conducting the experiments.
Experiments
- Open loop response of various process configurations (10 in all).
- Study of closed loop response for above.
- P, PI, PD and PID design and performance evaluation in each case.