Development of Visualization Tools for Response of 1st and 2nd Order Dynamic Systems - 2006 ASEE Conference

P.Avitabile, J.Hodgkins

Students often enter a Dynamic Systems course with no real background or exposure to many of the concepts used to define “non-static” systems. The material is often a significant departure from the previous material covered, and the vernacular/terminology is very new and unfamiliar to the students. Nomenclature and concepts such as poles, zeros, s-plane, and others cause some confusion for the students.

In order to help the students further explore these new concepts and ideas and overcome some of the issues related to this departure in material, several MATLAB and LabVIEW graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have been developed. GUIs related to response of first and second order systems due to a variety of different input conditions have been developed. The GUIs present data in a form so that students can immediately see the effects of changing system parameters as they relate to pole locations in the s-plane, time response and settling time, and complex frequency response characteristics. The GUIs are presented along with student survey assessment on the usefulness of the new software tools.

A PDF file will be available for downloading shortly

In the meantime, e-mail Peter_Avitabile@uml.edu for copy of paper