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An Introduction To Control Systems

Introduction What Is A Control System?

Why Use Feedback Control? The first question is really "Why do you need a control system at all?" Consider the following.

What good is an airplane if you are a pilot and you can't make it go where you want it to go? What good is a chemical products production line if you can't control temperature, pressure and pH in the process and you end up making tons of garbage? What good is an oven if you can't control the temperature? (And, does it matter if it's an oven in a kitchen or an oven in a heat-treating department that is used to harden metal parts?) What good is a pump if you can't control the flow rate it produces? (And, there are many times when the flow rate must be controlled.)

The common denominator in all of these questions is that there is some physical quantity that must be somehow controlled in a way that ensures that the physical quantity takes on the value that is specified. There are even times when the physical quantity should take on some pre-determined values that follow a function of time. (An example of that would be landing an airplane where you want the plane to meet the ground following a specified curve.) We need to think about how to control physical quantities in general, and to determine what can be done - in a general way - to implement any schem we devise. That implies a couple of things. There are lots of ways you can do that. For example, in your home you set a temperature by dialing it into the thermostat. 1

When an airplane is landing there is a radar beacon at the far end of the runway that tells the aircraft if it is too high or too low, too far right or too far left, and how much in all those cases. There are any number of ways you can tell a system what you want it to do. You can turn a dial, type a number into a computer program, or you can use some other physical quantity. (An example of that is trying to point an antenna at a weather or communications satellite. The satellite's position - which might be predictable with an astronomical formula gives the system the information it needs on where the antenna has to point.) One way or another, the control system has to know what it has to do. As you think about what you have to do to control a system, you realize that the information about how well a system is performing usually taken at the output of the system - has to be fed back around the system to the input and compared somehow with the input - the information about what you want the system to do - and that comparison gives you the information you need to produce/develp and apply a control signal.

What Is A Control System? In most systems there will be an input and an output. This block diagram represents that. (Control system designers and engineers use block diagrams to represent systems. Get used to them.) Signals flow from the input, through the system and produce an output.

The input will usually be an ideal form of the output. In other words the input is really what we want the output to be. It's the desired output.

The output of the system has to be measured. In the figure below, we show the system we are trying to control - the "plant" and a sensor that measures what the controlled system is doing. The input to the plant is usually called the control effort, and the output of the sensor is usually called the measured output, as shown below in the figure.

For example, if we want the output to be 100oC, then that's the input. If we want to control the output, we first need to measure the output. Within the whole system is the system we want to control the plant - along with a sensor that measures what the output actually is.

In our block diagram representation, we show the output signal being fed to the sensor which produces another signal that is dependent upon the output. A sensor might be an LM35, which produces a voltage proportional to temperature - if the output signal is a temperature. It often converts the output into a variable we can use. If the output is a temperature, we might want to have a voltage we can use to control a heater, for example. The LM35 temperature sensor, for example, produce .01 volts for every 1.0oC change. 3

Usually, the output, as measured by the sensor is subtracted from

the input (which is the desired output) as shown below. That forms an error signal that the controller can use to control the plant.

The device which performs the subtraction to compute the error, E, is a comparator.

Finally, the last part of this system is the controller.

The controller acts on the error signal and uses that information to produce the signal that actually affects the system we are trying to control. The controller has to provide enough power to drive the system. You don't want to try to control a large motor with a 741 operational amplifier. You just can't do that, so the controller has to be able to compute the control signal, and it has to be able to drive the system you are trying to control.

Now, let's start to refine our model.

Let's assume that the system we are trying to control is a linear system. 4

To account for the linear dynamics, we'll show the transfer function of the system. That transfer function will be G(s).

Once we realize that we can describe the system we are controlling, the plant, we realize that we can describe all of the components in the sytem with a transfer function description.

The sensor most likely has an output - typically a voltage - that is proportional to the physical variable it measures. That means that the transfer function is just a constant - a gain. We'll denote that by Ks.

The last item in our system is the controller. Controllers come in many varieties. The simplest - but certainly not the only one used - is a proportional controller. That's what we will consider here, but remember there are also integral controllers, and controllers that blend integral, proportional and derivative control and lots of others.

In a proportional controller, the control action is proportional to the error, and we can represent the controller as a gain, Kp.

With this block diagram, let's review what we hope happens in this system.

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