This course introduces students to the problems of automatic control with practical illustrations drawn from various areas of electrical, mechanical and process engineering.

2 lectures per week

ENG3021 Dynamics & Control 3

ENG3022 Dynamics & Control M3

None

90% Written Exam

10% Report (Laboratory Report)

The aims of this course are to:

■ introduce students to the problems of automatic control, with practical illustrations;

■ provide a basic understanding of techniques used to model engineering systems and to allow students to gain a physical understanding of the factors influencing the steady-state and dynamic response of practical systems;

■ provide an understanding of the time-domain and frequency-domain methods of analysis of control systems;

■ provide an understanding of the properties of proportional, integral and derivative controllers;

■ gain experience of real closed-loop control systems and to learn about analysis methods using computer-based techniques.

By the end of the course students should be able to:

■ draw block diagrams of systems and manipulate such block diagrams;

■ explain the concept of stability and compute the stability of a system using standard techniques;

■ identify the poles and zeros of a system and plot such poles and zeros in the Argand Plane;

■ contrast open-loop and closed-loop systems;

■ draw root-locus diagrams and infer properties of closed-loop systems from the position of the closed-loop poles;

■ sketch Bode and Nyquist plots and analyse system behaviour from them (including gain and phase margins and system bandwidth);

■ describe frequency responses as polar plots;

■ describe the properties of PID feedback controllers;

■ design and analyse foundational feedback control systems.

Students must attend the degree examination and submit at least 75% by weight of the other components of the course's summative assessment.

Students must attend the timetabled laboratory classes.