Physical Workbench for Technical Training in Discrete Time Control

The aim of this paper is to present the BANCO project and its first results. ESTIA had not experimental setups to make work labs in the discrete-time control courses. It is why some Alecop setups have been improved to use them in these work labs. They were prepared to be used in the Control courses of the second and the third year. The made improvements concern especially an electronic module and its programming. This module allows the students to implement discrete-time control algorithms and to observe the behaviour of some real thermal, hydraulic and mechatronic processes. The main hardware parts of this module designed and constructed in ESTIA are a microcontroller card and a signal shaping card. In addition, the module communicates with a PC in order to program it. Experimental results obtained with a discrete time R-S-T control algorithm programmed in the module are compared to those obtained with an analog PI controller already existing in the Alecop setups. Now, the setups are being improved even more in order to be able to change some parameters of the processes and to apply systems identification algorithm to these processes.