A course in industrial controls and manufacturing for EE students and other engineering majors

While traditional control theory is taught in the various undergraduate engineering programs, industry applications often involve continuous variable process control and discrete logic control in a manufacturing environment. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, a new course on industrial controls and manufacturing was developed to introduce undergraduate electrical engineering students and other engineering majors to the fundamentals of process control, discrete logic control, and manufacturing. Although elements of these topics can be found in courses offered by chemical engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, and textile engineering departments, the objective here is to provide an integrated presentation of the topics with an emphasis on controls. Central to the course is a laboratory project that provides students the opportunity to implement discrete logic and continuous variable control strategies on a real, physical system. Experiments involving PID control using a PC-based interface and discrete logic control using a PLC are a core part of the learning experience. In this paper details are given on the course content and the laboratory experiment.