Supervision and control system of a didactic plant in the teaching of industrial automation and control

This article presents a supervision and automatic control system of the pilot plant present in the Laboratory of Instrumentation, Automation and Control (LIAC) at UACSAUFRPE, aiming to cover the first three levels of the automation pyramid: field devices, control and supervision. The system architecture consists of two reservoirs, a programmable logic controller S7-1200, sensors, actuators, and the Elipse SCADA and Matlab software. The methodology for modeling using experimental identification for the level system is presented applying an input step to the plant, with the data being accessed from the supervisory system by the network through the OPC protocol. With the model obtained, simulation and experimentation results are presented using the Proportional- Integral (PI) control strategy for changes in the reference. Finally, a plant supervision and control system and a human-user interface are developed, allowing supervision of the four process variables: level, temperature, pressure and flow, and the level control in the upper reservoir. In addition, it is possible to manage alarms, historical records and reports, for decision making in failure prevision, maintenance and troubleshooting.