An Improved Instrumentation and Controls Course for Agricultural and Biological Engineering

Modern biological, biomedical, and agricultural systems use electronic sensors, instrumentation, and computers for acquisition of scientific data and for process control.Instrumentation is used for commercial product development, testing, and for research.An engineering course will be discussed, which addresses measurement principles, sensors, software, and characteristics of instrumentation and control systems with a variety of hands-on student activities.This is a required course for two ABET accredited biological and agricultural engineering degree programs.Students of both programs participate and interact within this single course.The course assumes the student to be a junior, senior, or first year graduate student who has had an introductory electronics course and has completed a majority of core and elective courses.The focus of student hands-on activities is through hardware applications and computer programming.Weekly laboratory activities include human exercise physiology and energy exchanges, electrocardiograms, spirometry, sensor response times, water quality and flow measurements, and proportional-integral-derivative (PID) and fuzzy logic temperature control.Some activities are web-based bringing local research projects and instrumentation to the classroom.Student teams also develop their own semester projects starting at midterm.Those projects are presented as papers and posters during an annual department open house.A summary of selected student projects for the past five years and student assessments will be discussed.Examples are presented in a draft book written by the instructor, who has taught this class for twenty-one years.