Virtual Laboratory in Labview for control and supervision applications with Arduino

摘要

In the academic field, specifically in mechatronics engineering, the teaching of automation techniques requires laboratory equipment (control and automation plants), which, due to their cost, generate problems of availability when performing practices. For this reason, plant virtualization is considered, being a viable and economical alternative for the development of laboratory practices. The LabView software from National Instruments is used to develop a virtual plant laboratory, in which the mathematical model of a system is implemented through transfer functions, discretization and recurrence relation (difference equation). Each input and output of the model is associated with a physical port of an Arduino board, allowing interaction with other platforms. The plant to be simulated is a cascade combination of two tanks, fed by a pump. Two interfaces are used, one to represent the simulated plant and another the control and monitoring system. From the latter, the pump ignition signal is sent, as well as the applied voltage, these are communicated by the Arduino card so that the program with the simulated plant performs the signal processing and the response of the system is obtained in real time.