The Team at Dnipro University of Technology has constructed a new test bench for the remote lab within the course “Control Engineering”. This discipline is being delivered at both partner universities.

The test bench, or a test stand is dedicated to adjustment of proportional-integral-derivative controller (PID-controller) for the first-order control plant. The latter in the test bench is a membrane compressor (by the way, the compressor was designed for artificial lung ventilation). Students will calculate PID-controller settings, verify them via simulation and then – on a real object, which always differs from the model. The idea of the lab is to assess the quality of transients under different settings and thus learn the influence of P,I and D components on the control quality.

The test bench consists of Schneider Electric Altivar 32 variable frequency drive, programmable logic controller (PLC Modicon M238) and WebHMI – an industrial computer, a device that connects the “brains” of the VFD to the web-page.

So far, mechanical setup has been set up J and all the electric connections have been connected. For its shape the team members call it a “throne”.

Of course, not everything goes smoothly and exactly as it was planned. Currently, the team is struggling with making the “internal web-page” or a dashboard visible to the user from the outer world.

So see you soon!