A laboratory for teaching process control: The wastewater treatment plant

Abstract

Laboratory experiments offer one way to introduce more realism in education and play a key role for the acquisition of practical skills, especially in engineering. This paper addresses the development of an equipment to teach fundamentals of industrial process control engineering mainly for undergraduate courses at the University of Extremadura. The laboratory consists of the DELTALAB–COSIMI wastewater treatment plant SP244, which is controlled by a CompactRIO-9014 high-performance real-time embedded controller, a kind of programmable logic controller of National Instruments. Learning objectives and a summary of students activities carried out in the laboratory lessons are given to illustrate the possibilities of use of this equipment for teaching of industrial process control.