Control Systems’ Lab

"Control Systems is one of the core courses offered to the students of Computer, Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering. In order to familiarize the students with the practical challenges of the course, the Department of Electrical Engineering at CUI Lahore has established the lab entitled as ‘Control-Measurements Lab’ in Room # B-5. This room can accommodate 40 students. There are a total of 20 workstations in the Lab with 20 state of the art Core-i5 Desktop Computers, which students use to perform the necessary simulations in various simulation tools that they encounter during their coursework of Control Systems Lab, including LabVIEW and MATLAB. Control Systems lab uses state of the art equipment of National Instruments. This Lab is also designated as LabVIEW Academy which is 7th in ASIA and 2nd in Pakistan. Students learn the control systems concepts on the state of art 20 NI-ELVIS based workstations. Students can also take CLAD exam to become internationally certified LabVIEW programmers. In the current laboratory manual, Experiment No. 8 and 9 are being conducted on this equipment. This equipment is available in the lab since November 2014. There is another hardware equipment available in the Lab knows as ‘QNET Heat Ventilation and Control Trainer (HVACT)’. Experiment No 12 is currently being conducted on that equipment. The primary purpose of the equipment is to provide students a hardware environment to let them understand the most basic Switch Control Operation of Control Theory by adjusting the heat of the lamp while fan is run at constant speed to provide ventilation. There are a total of 20 'Inverted Rotatory Pendulums' and 20 'Vertical Take-Off & Landing' stations available in the lab covering a comprehensive portion of the laboratory manual in last five experiments. The experiments include the interfacing of these apparatus with LabVIEW using NI ELVIS stations to control their position using PID and LQR controllers.students as well as faculty members that helps them realize their analog and digital communication theoretical concepts. The topics lie in the domain of this lab are digital and analog communications and signal processing for communication systems. From conventional analog communication to modern and efficient digital communication system, that includes concept of signal conditioning, modulation, signal shaping, transmission to reception and error free recovery, all these processes and more can be performed by utilizing the communication lab trainers/hardware as well as efficient software packages of MATLAB, SIMULINK and LABVIEW. This lab is equipped with state of the art sophisticated hardware and discrete components as well, to increase students’ engagement and provides complete concept of system’s working for them. The available equipment also enhances their capability to implement each process individually. Each experiment is designed so that every student has the opportunity to participate equally in the design and performance evaluation of the communication systems. State of the art equipment includes modular design based communication system trainers, function generators, oscilloscopes, bread boards and discrete components, digital multimeters, in addition to latest software defined radios, antennas, virtual test benches, etc. High end computing facility is also available for fast and accurate processing of algorithms, codes etc to verify and justify the results."