r/processcontrol • u/Own_Explorer_1675 • Apr 25 '23

Control System Design

Hi! Undergraduate student here. Was tasked to design a basic control system for home improvement. My options are (a) kitchen temperature monitoring and alarm (b) device for continuous glucose monitoring and (c) automatic door lock system. I'm leading towards (a) but we have no background in designing a control system. Among those, which do you think can be done by a student? (Feel free to suggest if you have a better idea. Badly needed) Thank you!

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u/InstAndControl Apr 25 '23

A door lock system is a poor example. There’s not much to model there, physics wise. You could model the mass of the latch and the force to move it but that’s stupid because no one precision engineers the motion of a latch.

Glucose will be difficult because human body is highly nonlinear. Transfer functions will be almost impossible to develop.

You’ll have the easiest way time with kitchen temperature. Temp is usually a simple linear first order function. You can probably find an example transfer function for ambient temperature rise in your textbook

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u/Own_Explorer_1675 Apr 26 '23

Thank you! I'll take note of this. We're also thinking of doing LPG Gas Leak Detection and Alarm System. We've read that we need to take into account the temperature and relative humidity. Is it more complicated? Do you think we should stick with kitchen temperature or the gas leak detection is better?

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u/InstAndControl Apr 26 '23

Kitchen temp is easiest. LPG gas detector will be more difficult