The course describes and analyzes control schemes which are frequently used at industrial level. It also provides the basics for the design of digital control systems.
Course Prerequisites
Knowledge acquired in previous courses in Automatic Control and Mathematical Methods in Engineering.
Teaching Methods
Lectures (hours/year in lecture theatre): 46 Practical class (hours/year in lecture theatre): 0 Practicals / Workshops (hours/year in lecture theatre): 0
Assessment Methods
Closed book written exam, without using notes. Both knowledge of theory and ability to solve simple exercises will be tested. The Process Control exam will consist of questions (from a minimum of 15 to a maximum of 20) to be answered in 45 minutes. Some questions will be focused on theory, others will be exercises, similarly to the homeworks which are proposed and corrected during the course. In case of multiple-choice questions, for any wrong reply there will be a penalty. No penalty for True and False questions.
Texts
Lecture notes
Slides of the lectures
Paolo Bolzern, Riccardo Scattolini, Nicola Schiavoni. Fondamenti di controlli automatici. McGraw-Hill, Milano. (In Italian).
Carlos A. Smith, Armando B. Corripio. Principles and Practices of Automatic Process Control. John Wiley and Sons. (In English)
Advanced MIMO control schemes: Decoupling based control schemes, decentralized control, relative gain array.
PID controllers: Features and properties. Rules for the empirical calibration. Wind-up and anti wind-up schemes.
Digital control: Discrete-time systems. The concept of equilibrium for discrete-time systems. Stability of linear time-invariant discrete-time systems. Jury test. Digital control schemes. Zeta transform and its properties. Transfer functions in the z domain. Sampling and aliasing. Choice of the sampling time. Zero-order-Hold. Discretization of continuous-time controllers. Bilinear transformation, Euler and Tustin methods.
