Control Systems

Automatic control systems play a very important role in modern industrial systems and many of the industrial achievements known today would have never been possible without efficient control systems in place. Examples can be found in the beginning of the industrial revolution (i.e. the flyball governor of Watt’s steam engine) and in most industries today (chemical, paper and metal industries, transportation, aerospace applications, automatic manufacturing, electric power systems, etc.). The theory of automatic control has imported methods not only from close fields such as communications (electronic amplifiers and signal processing techniques) but also from unlike disciplines such as vibration analysis, optimisation or celestial mechanics. Furthermore, some control-related techniques originally developed only for industry are now being used in many different fields: computer simulation, economics, system dynamics, organisation and administration models, etc. Nowadays, automatic control is an important field with well established techniques, a wide range of applications and many connections with many different disciplines.

This is the translation of the book Regulación Automática by F.L. Pagola as it was published in 2006. The translation has been done following the original text closely although the layout has been changed using LATEX features and a couple of translator’s notes have been included. The effort was first focused on having a version that ICAI students could use for reference after the lectures in the course Control Systems 3er year IEM during the academic year 2015-16: all the equations, exercises, figures and tables they needed were included in the first manuscript and were reviewed thoroughly. Although further review was undertaken before the present version was made available, errors are possible (and likely) and we will appreciate if, once spotted, they are communicated as soon as possible to be corrected. Please, report any errors found to aurelio@comillas.edu The manuscript has been typed using TeXmaker, TeXstudio and TeXworks, and it has been compiled using pdflatex. The date on the cover of this book is that of the last compilation.