Understanding the concept and principle of process control engineering study through hand-on experiences

Abstract

Control Engineering curriculum is often viewed by students as theoritical and highly mathematical. Students are often unable to relate the theory to the application in the real process. The obvious solution to this problem is to include activity-based laboratory hand-on learning (HOL) in the curriculum paralleling to support and complement the lectures. Understanding concepts tough in the classroom will improve significantly when they have the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in a laboratory. This experience is an introductory exposure to process dynamic, modeling, simulation and control process. This paper presents the development of educational laboratory equipment Continuous Flow Stirred-Tank Thermal Process (CFS-TTP) trainer for teaching purposes. The system uses a simple physical process that incorporates with the introductory concepts of the process control system and instrumentation areas. This trainer comes together with theory, background information, modeling and systematic experimental module covering topics on sensor & transducer, signal conditioning, interfacing, data acquisition system, basic control principles, feedback control, digital control, real time control, controller tuning method and troubleshooting. These concepts to ensure that the students receive the appropriate experience to work productively to solve control problems they may encounter in industry.