Dr. Hassan Zargarzadeh
Associate Professor
This course provides sophomore-level engineering students a comprehensive knowledge to instrumentation used in process control. With an emphasis on common industrial applications, this course covers the four fundamental instrumentation measurements of temperature, pressure, level, and flow, in addition to position, humidity, moisture, and typical liquid and gas measuring instruments. Fundamental scientific principles and detailed illustrations will be used to present the course content.
This course introduces important concepts in the analysis and design of control systems. Control theories commonly used today are classical control theory (also called conventional control theory), modern control theory, and robust control theory. This course presents comprehensive treatments of the analysis and design of control systems based on the classical control theory and modern control theory. Control engineering is essential in any field of engineering and science. It is an important and integral part of space-vehicle systems, robotic systems, modern manufacturing systems, and any industrial operations involving control of temperature, pressure, humidity, flow, etc. It is desirable that any engineer and scientist be familiar with the theory and designing processes of automatic control systems. This undergraduate course is intended to be an introductory to control engineering at the senior level.
The course starts with switched-mode DC-DC converters. First, basic circuit operation, including steady-state converter modeling and analysis, switch realization, discontinuous conduction mode, and transformer-isolated converters will be covered. Next, converter control systems are covered, including AC modeling of converters using averaged methods, small-signal transfer functions, and classical feedback loop design.
Robotics is a relatively young field of modern technology that crosses traditional engineering boundaries. Understanding the complexity of robots and their applications requires knowledge of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, systems and industrial engineering, computer science, economics, and mathematics. New disciplines of engineering, such as manufacturing engineering, applications engineering, and knowledge engineering have emerged to deal with the complexity of the field of robotics and factory automation. This course is concerned with fundamentals of robotics, including kinematics, dynamics, motion planning, computer vision, and control. The goal is to provide a complete introduction to the most important concepts in these subjects as applied to industrial robot manipulators, mobile robots, and other mechanical systems. A complete treatment of the discipline of robotics would require several courses. Nevertheless, at the present time, the majority of robot applications deal with industrial robot arms operating in structured factory environments so that a first introductory course must include a rigorous treatment of such robots.
This course is to teach electrical engineering students the fundamental concepts, methods of analysis, and design of programmable logic controllers and systems. Topics include programmable logic controllers, ladder logic programming, and advanced PLC operations.