Fundamentals of Control Systems (e-textbook, 2nd edition)

Fundamentals of Control Systems

Author:  Hendrik D Mouton 

Dr H D Mouton worked for 37 years in the missile industry where most of his work was directly or indirectly connected to control systems and simulations. Thereafter he taught a control systems course for 7 years at UCT to the mechanical and mechatronics engineering students in the mechanical department as an associate professor. This course’s development started in the last 15 years of his industrial career, where he presented several short courses to his colleagues. It was expanded and led to this book in the 7 years of his academic career.

The purpose of this book is to rather give readers a good understanding of the fundamentals of Control Systems; not to teach them recipes that will anyway only work in standard cases. Classical control in terms of Bode plots and Root Locus are covered, but the Bode Plot design technique is the main focus. This technique was expanded in this book to a more practically useful level than often found.

The development of the material started when the author worked for a few decades for a missile developing company in South Africa, and it was extended to form the basis of a control systems course taught to final year mechanical and mechatronics engineering students at UCT, during the last 7 years of his full-time working career. Analogue and digital systems, and combinations of them are discussed. Therefore s-transforms and z-transforms are investigated and used, but also the effects of limits, sampling, resolution and non-linearities such as practical friction and dead bands. Many examples and numerous own work tasks are given.

Almost all the simulations and graphical plots in the book, were done with the software Simul_C_EM, which is available with a course, as a product on this website.  It is not necessary to have this software to gain knowledge from the book, but it will help significantly, almost as much as also working with hardware at the same time.