Introduction

The primary goal of our project was to research and implement an observer-based control system proposed by George Ellis in his book, Observers in Control Systems. Ellis's observer is unique in that it can be tuned with a classical PID controller. The plant for evaluating the controller designs was a small scale engine cooling system. The controllers were implemented on two Texas Instruments TMS320F2812 DSP Evaluation boards. One DSP was used for engine control and the other DSP for temperature regulation of the cooling system.

The performance evaluations of the observer-based control systems were compared with conventional controllers designed with root locus and frequency domain methods. Additional topics addressed in the project included plant system identification, sensor linearization, anti- windup control, feed-forward control, engine power governor, energy management and safety features for cooling system, and auto-code generation using Simulink, Real-Time Workshop, and Code Composer software.