9452032 Ahmed-Zaid The objective of this project is the development of a modular design laboratory for senior-level undergraduate electrical engineering students. This laboratory integrates physically-based devices and components within a PC-based data acquisition and control environment. The new design sections offer an integrated systems approach for the rapid development and implementation of both hardware and software in a complete engineering design. The educational goals of this laboratory are to teach the fundamentals of electric machinery, power electronics and solid-state devices, electric drives, motor control, and robotics, with reliability techniques incorporated in the evaluation of alternative design solutions. The experiments are systems-oriented and build on concepts such as stability, feedback, and analog/digital controller design for various plants. Microprocessor control and modern instrumentation are emphasized throughout for the performance evaluation of the designs in real-world environments subject to modeling errors, disturbances, measurement noise, and sensor and control system failures. Four initial design sections are built around eight PC-based data acquisition and control (DAC) workstations. Each DAC workstation consists of a 486/PC with specialized hardware/software and dedicated test instruments (digitizing scope, signal analyzer, etc.). Each system is equipped with an embedded high-performance digital signal processor (DSP) board interfaced with a physical plant (electric machine, inverted pendulum, robotic arm, etc.) via sensor I/O signals (encoder, Hall-effect device, etc.) A DAC programming environment is used for the identification of the system plant and the rapid design and implementation of prototype controllers, both classical and advanced, in either a simulated or real-time fashion.
