Photo Of Lab Station

The lab station pictured above is used as a teaching device in one of my week long fundamentals of controls strategies courses. This course assumes the student has an understanding of the fundamentals of electricity and some electronics and has an understanding of basic math and algebra.

We start the week discussing the purpose of control and some typical control applications. All control begins with sensors so we spend an entire day covering binary and analog sensors, how they work, how they are constructed and how to properly install and calibrate them.

Sensors are inputs to a controller so we then cover controllers, their purpose, construction and basic operation. We use laptop computers as a window into the controller allowing us to set up a pre-existing software program for a basic HVAC system.

Next, we move from the output of the controller to controlled devices. Controlled devices include valves, dampers, variable speed drives, relays, contactors and starters. Controlled devices are discussed in enough detail so as to ensure the control system outputs are "tuned" to the particular function of each controlled device.

This typical five-day class is delivered via a combination of the use of PowerPoint, lecture, discussion, the instructor's personal whiteboard sketches, several video clips and a great deal of hands-on labs. Approximately 50% of the class time is student hands-on activity where the theory is applied to the real world. This class is always a big hit with everyone who takes the class.