Page 20 - Practical Control Engineering a Guide for Engineers, Managers, and Practitioners

Preface xix

assign homework having the students reproduce or modify the figures
containing simulation and control exercises. I will, upon request, sup-
ply you with a set of Matlab scripts or m-files that will generate all the
mathematically based figures in the book. Send me an e-mail and con-
vince me you are not a student in a class using this book.

References
There aren't any. That's a little blunt but I don't see you as a control
theory scholar-for one thing, you don't have time. However, if you
are a college-level engineering student then you already have an
arsenal of supporting textbooks at your beck and call.

A Thumbnail Sketch of the Book
The first chapter presents a brief qualitative introduction to many
aspects of control engineering and process analysis. The emphasis is
on insight rather than specific quantitative techniques.
The second chapter continues the qualitative approach (but not
for long). It will spend some serious time dealing with how the
engineer should approach the control problem. It will suggest a lot
of upfront time be spent on analyzing the process to be controlled. If
the approaches advocated here are followed, your control engineer
may be able to bypass up the development of a control algorithm
altogether.
Since the second chapter emphasized process analysis, the third
chapter picks up on this theme and delves into the subject in detail.
This chapter will be the first to use mathematics extensively. My basic
approach here and throughout the book will be to develop most of
the concepts carefully and slowly for simple first-order systems (to be
defined later) since the math is so much friendlier. Extensions to more
complicated systems will sometimes be done either inductively
without proof or by demonstration or with support in the appendices.
I think it is sufficient to fully understand the concepts when applied
to first-order situations and then to merely feel comfortable about
those concepts in other more sophisticated environments.
The third chapter covers a wide range of subjects. It starts with an
elementary but thorough mathematical time-domain description of
the first-order process. This will require a little bit of calculus which
is reviewed in Appendix A. The proportional and proportional-
integral control algorithms will be applied to the first-order process
and some simple mathematics will be used to study the system. We
then will move directly to the s-domain via the Laplace transform
(supported in Appendix F). This is an important subject for control
engineers and can be a bit scary. It will be my challenge to present it
logically, straightforwardly, and clearly.