LEARNING & TEACHING INNOVATION PROJECT

Application Form
Please complete this application form in Arial 10pt and submit electronically to helen.george@lsbu.ac.uk by 5pm on Wednesday 13th December For guidance please consult the Chair of your Faculty Learning & Teaching Committee or the Learning & Teaching Enhancement Unit www.lsbu.ac.uk/lteu All applications will be considered by the University Learning & Teaching Committee and successful projects will be announced in January 2007
Please specify individual or team project:

Team
Contact details
Name: Job title: Faculty: Department: Address: Tariq Sattar Reader Engineering, Science and the Built Environment Electrical, Computer and Communications Engineering (ECCE) T604, 103 Borough Road, LSBU

Email address: Telephone number:

sattartp@lsbu.ac.uk 020 7 815 7518

Other team members (if applicable insert additional rows if necessary)

Name: Faculty/Department: Name: Faculty/Department: John Orrin, Applied Science Dr Shuwo Chen, Zahir Mehdi, ECCE

Project information
Title: Simulation, Animation And Real-Time Control Environment To Enhance the Learning and Teaching Of The Design Of Circuits, Signals, Electronic Systems, And Control Engineering Both In Laboratories And Via Distance ELearning The team delivers two core units to the facultys Common Engineering programme (level 2 Principles of Control (110-130 students); level 3 Control Engineering (90-100 students) and a core unit to all ECCE BEng programmes (level 2 Circuits, Signals and Systems (90-100 students)). Students on the Mechanical Engineering, Electrical & Electronic Engineering (EEE), Chemical & Process Engineering, Petrochemical Engineering take the first two units while the EEE and Telecommunications and Computer network Engineering, take the third unit. The diverse backgrounds and the requirements of discipline relevant case studies and design practice make it essential that tutorial, laboratory and workshop exercises cater to their needs. It is hugely expensive and in many cases impractical to provide real equipment and pilot plant in the laboratories on which design exercises can be based. The student obviously cannot continue self-learning while away from the labs.

Objectives:

All these students are given a licensed copy of the Mathworks software MATLAB/Simulink in the first year and use this analysis and design software again on the three units in years two and three. The project will build on this by developing design exercises to work with simulated and animated dynamical systems. The simulated systems will show the realistic physical behaviour of the systems with visual animation and graphical displays, realistic instrumentation panels based on GUI buttons and gauges, and show signal behaviour on oscilloscopes, dials, gauges and graphs. The dynamical systems will be selected from interesting mechanical devices such as robots and manipulators, electromechanical systems such as servo motor/gearbox combinations, electrical circuits, and process plants with liquid level, temperature and flow control requirements. Sensor non-linearity, lags, dead-times, transportation delays and stochastic noise will be added to the models using standard Simulink library functions to give realistic simulations. The study could be formulated as a game to enhance student interest and motivation, e.g. controlling the levitation of a ferrous ball in an electromagnetic field. Get it wrong and the ball either crashes to the floor or sticks to the face of the magnet. Students working in parallel and trying to be first in successfully levitating the ball should enjoy the challenge. The range of systems that can be controlled will be much larger than can be physically provided and will obviate factors such as safety, resource expense, and technical maintenance. Students will be able to continue the study on their own computers while away from the university. Finally, the control systems developed in Simulink/MATLAB will be translated into C code using Real-Time Windows Target (RTWinTgt) and Real Time Works to control real systems in the lab. These pilot plant were inherited from the Chemical Engineering department and currently are not interfaced to computers. The project will build these interfaces. The potential for disseminating this practice across the university is extremely high as numerous units in dynamics, control, real-time systems, embedded systems, electronics, instrumentation, and sensors will be able to use the techniques developed during the project. The commercial potential for exploitation of the work is high as there is at present (to our knowledge) no package that presents a systematic investigation of interesting dynamical systems with good visualization of their behaviour and an interactive study of their control. The minimum outcome can be a book on control design supported by a software package. Some initial development along these lines is already available for demonstration. The department has most of the capital equipment and process rigs required for the development but will require the building of computer interfaces vai I/O boards. Support requested (up to 3000 individual / 15000 team):15,000

Project description
(Please provide a brief description of the work to be conducted, including: rationale and aims; overview of the work plan; deliverables; and outcomes. Maximum 1000 words 1.5 line spacing) Aims: To develop MATLAB/ Simulink/ WinTgt based workshop and distance e-learning materials that simulate a range of dynamical systems, sensors and signals from the engineering disciplines of Electrical & Electronics, Mechanical, Chemical and Petrochemical engineering The work will be conducted by: 1. Identifying a set of dynamical systems that pose interesting and difficult control problems. These

systems will encompass mechanical devices, electromechanical devices, and process plants. They will have significant non-linearitys (actuator or sensor), dead time, transport lags, and noise. This identification will be done by searching the control literature for suitable systems that have already been modelled and verified. Some Simulink models are commercially available [14] but tend to be built into the vendors software packages. 2. Modelling the dynamics of the set of systems in (1) and creating Simulink models. 3. Writing embedded MATLAB blocks and S-functions for those dynamics for which library blocks do not exist [1]. 4. Developing animation graphics to show the system e.g. water filling up twin coupled tanks, flowing through pipe work, mechanisms in motion e.g. a two link planar manipulator robot, a spring-cart system, an engine fuel/air catalytic converter system, servo systems with rotating loads, levitating ball, etc. The graphics would be written in Visual C and interfaced to the Simulink model. 5. Developing a Graphical User Interface from which the student can start/stop the process, view signal histories on oscilloscopes, gauges, dials and graphs. 6. Writing experiment sheets describing the systems and control tasks. 7. Formulating design algorithms that will enable the student to perform a design and analyse system performance for each selected system guided by Mathworks Webinars [6]. 8. Developing some real pilot plant and sensor/computer interfaces to enable real-time control of laboratory rigs with Windows Real Time Target e.g [7]. 9. Preparing experiment manuals to enable students to control the rigs in (8). 10. Developing Simulink/MATLAB investigations to synthesise complex signals such as square waves, sawtooth waveforms, triangular waveforms, half-rectified sine waves, full-rectified sine waves, rectangular pulses (single shot), etc from their Fourier series and Fourier Transforms. Conversely, finding the frequency power spectrum of measured complex signals using the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm; finding the Bode plot frequency spectrum of systems. 11. Preparing a book that organises the material to enable a student to work through the exercises in a logical development so that the methodology of modelling, analysis and design can be self learnt. Deliverables: 1. MATLAB/Simulink models and associated animation visuals plus GUIs for a range of signals and dynamical systems. Supplied on a CD. 2. Investigation manuals that lead a student through analysis and design phases for each model. Supplied on paper, Blackboard and CD. 3. Draft of book that organises the investigations and supplies additional systems that will constitute a substantial resource. An example of the proposed development is shown on the following page. At the top of the page is a Simulink model that models the dynamics of a heat exchanger and a feedback/ feedforward control system. The model includes plant disturbance and desired tank temperature as inputs, and displays the actual temperature, control signal and disturbance on an oscilloscope as well as writing the data to

the MATLAB workspace. The figure in the bottom left hand corner shows the plant changes visually as the simulation proceeds, contains buttons to start and stop the simulation and sliders to change controller gains during the simulation. If this plant was also a real plant then the controller tuned here could be translated into C code after adding to the model ADC and DAC blocks corresponding to the actual I/O card used to interface the plant to the control computer.

HEAT EXCHANGER TEMPERATURE CONTROL DEMO

DISTURBANCE
In 1 O u t1 In 1 O u t1

Disturbance d Sc ope

Feedforward Control Gff

Plant Disturbanc e Gd Temperature y

0 SETPOINT

In 1

O u t1

In 1 O u t1

heatex_getdata Get Data Control Signal u

Feedbac k Control Gc

Heat Exc hanger Plant Gp

Heat Exchanger Control (Double click on the "?" for more info)

To start and stop the simulation, use the "Start" and "Stop" selections in the "Simulation" pull-down menu.

Double click here for Simulink Help

Response of Feedback Control Sy stem

1.5
Normalised Magnitude

1 0.5 0 d -0.5 -1 0 50 100

Time (seconds)

Gd

y u 150 200

+ -

Gc

u Gp

+ y

TC

Project Plan: Month Task A: Identify suitable dynamical systems from literature Task B: Develop Simulink Models, develop visuals and animation Task C: Develop experiments and design manuals Task D: Evaluate materials via student feedback, Revise Task E: Publish and produce CDs Task F: Disseminate development to potential users for extension of work 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Projected costs
(Awards will not be made for the development of course, capital purchase or attending courses) 1. Buy out of teaching time of some members of the team to enable the development or employing our RAs and RFs to do the development 6K 2. Purchase of full version of MATLAB/Simulink/RTWinTgt plus manuals (Graphics, Simulink, Matlab) for the team as currently we have a student version which is not allowed to be used for reseach purposes. Purchase of license to bundle mathworks software with our materials. 1K 3. Development of two pilot process rigs for experimentation to show translation of simulated controller into a real-time controller using Windows real Time Target - 4K 4. Purchase of PCI 230 Multifunction 16-bit Digital I/O boards and connectors/cable to interface the rigs (pilot plant) to PCs - 2K 5. Cost of creating CDs for 200-300 students - 1K 6. Printing costs of manuals and book - 1K 7. Cost (if any) of protecting Intellectual property and Copyright

References
[1] MATLAB/Simulink Model as a tool for process design and commissioning, Kelvin Hales, KHACE [2] Simulink Models of an Inverted pendulum and a DC Motor, http://umlab.ru/download/40/manual/eng/gs_UM_Control.pdf

[3] Mechanical Simulation (CARSim, TruckSim, BikeSim), Simulation Services, Models and Tools, http://www.khace.com/services/simulation/khacetoollist.html [4] Teaching system dynamics and controls by Thomas J. Connolly, PH.D, Senior Lecturer, Department of Mechanical Engineering & Biomechanics, University of Texas, San Antonio [5] Teaching Physiology with Simulink by Lena H. Ting and Robert H. Lee Biomedical Engineering Department, Emory University School of Medicine and Georgia Institute of Technology [6] Webinar Mathworks Seminars, Mathtool.net (Link exchange for the technical computing community) [7] Digital Pendulum Control System 33-005 from Feedback Instruments Ltd uses Transfer function and state space models in Simulink, http://www.fbk.com/control-instrumentation/33-005.asp

All bids should indicate if they have support of the relevant Head of Academic Department: HoD Signature: ________________________________________ Date: ______________