Teaching Cascaded Controllers with a Fuel Cell Plant in a Hands-on Laboratory

It is generally accepted that practical experience has a positive effect on the learning process. Hence, a hands-on laboratory is a main pillar of the education concept of the Chair for Process Control Engineering, RWTH Aachen University. The topic of cascaded controllers was added to the lecture “Process Control Engineering” recently. The behaviour of these controllers is not trivial to imagine. Therefore, the hands-on laboratory is a predestined way to deepen the students’ knowledge and build up a basic image of the correlations. In this paper we show how the hands-on laboratory is extended to include the new topic. We will introduce a fuel cell plant which is build up in the laboratory for the new experiments and show how these experiments are fit into the overall laboratory course.