9352523 Crisalle The development and implementation of a Virtual Control Lab (VCL) for teaching the design and analysis of control systems is conducted by this project. This educational software is supported on personal-computer platforms and uses object-oriented programming to produce virtual devices representing physical systems, control instrumentation, and data acquisition and display devices. The objective of the VCL is to give students the possibility of exploring with alternative operational scenarios: they can experiment with the effect of changing different control parameters, operating the system under different regimes, and trying out alterative control configurations. As a pedagogical tool the VCL permits the development of practical experience using a convincingly realistic environment. A major appeal of the VCL is that it accomplishes teaching goals that would be difficult to attain using physical experimental systems that often respond slowly to actuations, and which may be expensive to operate and maintain. Since the entire spectrum of control applications in all relevant engineering disciplines are essentially amenable to the same analysis and design strategies, VCL is designed as a multidisciplinary tool. In this project the VCL is used to teach control technology to both chemical and electrical engineering undergraduates. One representative system from each of these disciplines is modeled as a virtual device; however, both systems share the same control structures and display devices. The contents of relevant courses will be modified to incorporate experiments done with the VCL. Subsequently, the VCL will be used to carry out control experiments on physical systems. ln these applications the virtual system is deactivated, however, the controller and display devices remain unaltered and the students can then make use of previous experience gained from experimentation with the virtual system. ***
