自动化专业英语_lesson1_学生自动化专业英语_lesson1_学生.doc

Lesson 1 Introduction to Control System PartΙ Introduction Automatic control has played a vital role in the advancement of engineering and science. In addition to its extreme importance in space-vehicle, missile-guidance, and aircraft-piloting systems, etc, automatic control has become an important and integral part of modern manufacturing and industrial processes. For example, automatic control is essential in such industrial operations as controlling pressure, temperature, humidity, viscosity, and flow in the process industries; tooling, handling, and assembling mechanical parts in the manufacturing industries, among many others. Since advances in the theory and practice of automatic control provide means for attaining optimal performance of dynamic systems, improve the quality and lower the cost of production, expand the production rate, relieve the drudgery of many routine, repetitive manual operations etc, most engineers and scientists must now have a good understanding of this field. The first significant work in automatic control was James Watt’s centrifugal governor for the speed control of a steam engine in the eighteenth century. Other significant works in the early stages of development of control theory were due to Minorsky, Hazen, and Nyquist, among many others. In 1922 Minorsky worked on automatic controllers for steering ships and showed how stability could be determined by the differential equations describing the system. In 1934 Hazen, who introduced the term “servomechanisms” for position control systems, discussed design of relay servomechanisms capable of closely following a changing input. During the decade of the 1940’s, frequency-response methods made it possible for engineers to design linear feedback control systems that satisfied performance requirements. From the end of the 1940’s to early 1950’s, the root-locus method in control system design was fully developed. The frequency-response and the root-locus methods, which are the core of cl