Improving Laboratories with Internet Controlled Equipment and Student Support

The engineering laboratory equipment at UTC has been made available for users via the World Wide Web. Users can conduct systems lab experiments from remote sites, anytime day-or-night, any day of the week. With remote access, students need support in a different manner than with traditional laboratory courses. This paper discusses aspects of this situation and suggests ways to accomplish this student support. Introduction This paper describes the hardware and software that is used for this on-line laboratory facility and describes the way the server & clients are managed. The hardware consists of distributed desktop computers connected to a variety of engineering laboratory equipment. The software is all implemented with LabVIEW. The web address (URL) for the lab is http://chem.engr.utc.edu Hardware and Software The engineering laboratory at UTC for several years has been using desktop computers for data acquisition and control of engineering equipment. The students conduct experiments to accomplish system identification and to design feedback controllers for the systems. The data acquisition and control software is written with LabVIEW software. Controller design involves tuning two feedback controllers: a proportional controller and a proportional-integral controller. The computers are all networked with Ethernet and have Internet (IP) addresses. A web-server program was developed which allows users to conduct experiments using widely available web browsers. The users conduct the experiments either from computer labs on campus or from home computers via Internet providers. More details are given in Henry (1996, 1997, 1998a and 1998b). Hardware Stations Different stations for different laboratories are available. There are 7 stations for controls systems experiments, 6 stations for chemical engineering experiments, 3 stations for environmental engineering, and 2 stations for mechanical engineering. Some of these are single-input, single output systems. All are inherently stable systems when run in open-loop configuration. That is, if you specify a fixed input value, the system will reach a constant steady-state condition. More complete descriptions of these have been given before (Henry, 1993, and Henry, 1995).