Developing Process Control Experiments for Undergraduate Chemical Engineering Laboratories

It is the intent of this work to develop a process control apparatus and series of experiments that will help students visualize the PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) control of a process and enhance their understanding of the subject. The apparatus is a computer-controlled PID mixing system that responds quickly to set point changes and process disturbances which are directly observable. The system can easily be simulated with a transfer function model in Matlab's Simulink, so that the controller can be optimized for the desired system response. Four experiments can be conducted with this system including: exploration of system modeling and controller optimization in MatLab, set point tracking and disturbance rejection, the destabilizing effect of a time delay, and variable pairing in MIMO systems using the relative gain array (RGA). Several controller tuning methods are discussed, with both simulations and process performances reported and analyzed.