Low cost teaching bench for teaching controllers applied to power systems

Abstract

Control systems are present in several routine applications, be they industrial, commercial, biomedical, entertainment, or any other applications. However, putting learning about control theories into practice is not always a trivial task, as there are other fundamental activities involved that precede the implementation of controllers in practice. Furthermore, programming the controllers in a language suitable for a microcontroller commonly poses challenges to students who are only used to performing numerical simulations of these

controllers. However, the act of implementing the controllers on a microcontroller and the visualization of experimental results contribute significantly to the sedimentation of theoretical knowledge of these theories. However, the most popular commercial teaching benches for teaching control are systems with a relatively high cost, which is often not available in the institutions' budget. Alternatively, the construction of low-cost devices is a way to meet this demand and, therefore, contribute to more solid teaching, training more experienced professionals in their areas due to active learning. Therefore, this work presents the project of a low-cost teaching bench for validating various control techniques. This teaching bench is a power regulator and to corroborate the feasibility of using this prototype for teaching control, a deadbeat controller was implemented and validated in this system.