436-401 Control of Mechanical Systems

Credit Points

HECS Band

Coordinator

Prerequisites

Students are expected to be familiar with the material of 436-301 Control Systems and 436-305 Data Acquisition and Control.

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

On completion of this subject, students should be able to: understand the concepts of state space control and estimation; obtain state-space realisations of systems in several canonical forms and assess their stability, controllability and observability; design a state feedback control law and a state estimator to achieve desired closed-loop response characteristics; design simple digital controllers for single-input single-output systems using classical and state-space methods; demonstrate familiarity with the structure, components and programming of practical controllers, and the effects of sampling rate and amplitude quantisation.

Topics covered include: state-space design. Analysis: representation, transformations, canonical forms; solution of state-space equations; stability, controllability, observability. Design: pole-placement design of controllers and state estimators; comparison with classical control design. Digital control theory: sampling theory, z-transforms, time- and z-domain analysis; bilinear transformation and frequency domain design; root locus design in z-plane; PID control; pole placement design using state-space and polynomial methods. Control technology: Digital control system hardware and real-time software development, implementing control loops with PCs and PLCs. Case studies: detailed examination of digital control issues for a representative mechanical engineering system, such as a fuel injection controller.

Assessment

One examination not exceeding three hours; tests, assignments and laboratory reports, not exceeding 20 pages. Students will be notified of the weighting of assessment components at the beginning of semester.