- #1
dvscrobe
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I am in my 4th year in a Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering Technology (BSEET) program that leans toward electrical transmission and distribution. I have had two courses in calculus, so have briefly covered differential equations. Unfortunately, my course curriculum does not cover control systems, which I have started to have a great interest in knowing about. As an employee for a transmission owner company, there is great application to understanding control theory. For example, a power transformer with a Beckwith controller will attempt to regulate its low side voltage with the use of a load tap changer. The only problem is that the math is very complicated! My school offers a course on control systems and I plan to take it as an elective but I got extremely lost when I got to the chapter on explaining the math formulas. I have found an online book at Cal-Tech's website (link below) to be the best online source. It is written very well and it doesn't dive into the math too quickly. I am hoping that a few on the boards here can help me with a few questions I have to help get me on my feet. I am using the damped spring system as my example to learn.
1) What the heck is state space? My understanding of state space is that your control formula takes into consideration real time states of a system, the inputs to it, and the system's output. But, a damped spring mass system has actually three states, position, velocity, and acceleration. Is the goal of writing a state space formula to always to ensure that there is only a 1st order ordinary differential equation?
Thanks, Dan
http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/books/AM08/pdf/am08-complete_04Mar10.pdf
1) What the heck is state space? My understanding of state space is that your control formula takes into consideration real time states of a system, the inputs to it, and the system's output. But, a damped spring mass system has actually three states, position, velocity, and acceleration. Is the goal of writing a state space formula to always to ensure that there is only a 1st order ordinary differential equation?
Thanks, Dan
http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/books/AM08/pdf/am08-complete_04Mar10.pdf