DEVELOPMENT OF CLASSICAL CONTROL TOOLBOX FOR MICROSOFT EXCEL

Abstract

The analysis and design of control systems are now almost mundane activities when some special packages are available. An example is the MATLAB software. Unfortunately, legal copies of the software are very expensive and its omnibus nature makes it both difficult and inaccessible to institutions and users. It is in the light of this that an effort is being made to develop a set of toolboxes for the relatively common but versatile spreadsheet – Microsoft EXCEL®. This work presents a Microsoft Excel based Control Toolbox as a teaching and learning aid for the analysis and design of Linear Time Invariant (LTI) control systems. It employs the Visual Basic Application (VBA) for Microsoft Excel to implement various procedures and include a versatile graphic-user interface (GUI) with the full capabilities of the Excel spreadsheet engine. In this project, the generalized form of the linear time invariant (LTI) system as represented in the frequency domain is used to generate suitable algorithmic procedures that enable a user to deploy tools of classical control. As a result, a Control Toolbox was developed to generate Polar, Nyquist and Bode Plots. Some examples were treated using resulting toolbox. The results obtained provide correct and useful analyses description of the systems considered.