Practical experiences on a real pumping system emulated by a hardware model and used as a remote laboratory

Paper submitted to ACE 2013, 10th IFAC Symposium on Advances in Control Education, University of Sheffield, UK, August 28-30, 2013.

This paper describes a remote laboratory employed in the practical learning of the subject “Control Systems” which is taught in the Automatics and Robotics Master's degree at the University of Alicante. The application developed allows students to practice remotely different theoretical concepts using of a hardware model of a real industrial process about a pumping system. In the paper, it is described the most important features of the remote laboratory, highlighting its ability to perform the automatic evaluation of the student. The application proposes a set of practical experiences which students must resolve making use of the remote laboratory. In addition, the application offers a feedback that guides the student about the concepts to improve in their learning. This information can be used by the student to perform a self-learning. The paper ends with a study that describes the educational impact about the use of this tool in the students’ learning.

This work is supported by the program “Technologic & Educative Research Groups” of the University of Alicante.