Name: Arif Hanafi Bin Md Zaki

Class: EH1104A
No. matrix: 2016800892
Written by: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Control system
Control system, means by which a variable quantity or set of variable
quantities is made to conform to a prescribed norm. It either holds the
values of the controlled quantities constant or causes them to vary in a
prescribed way. A control system may be operated by electricity, by
mechanical means, by fluid pressure (liquid or gas), or by a combination of
means. When a computer is involved in the control circuit, it is usually more
convenient to operate all of the control systems electrically, although
intermixtures are fairly common.

Development of Control Systems

Control systems are intimately related to the concept of automation(q.v.),
but the two fundamental types of control systems, feedforward and
feedback, have classic ancestry. The loom invented by Joseph Jacquard of
France in 1801 is an early example of feedforward; a set of punched cards
programmed the patterns woven by the loom; no information from the
process was used to correct the machine’s operation. Similar feedforward
control was incorporated in a number of machine tools invented in the 19th
century, in which a cutting tool followed the shape of a model.
Feedback control, in which information from the process is used to correct
a machine’s operation, has an even older history. Roman engineers
maintained water levels for their aqueduct system by means of floating
valves that opened and closed at appropriate levels. The Dutch windmill of
the 17th century was kept facing the wind by the action of an auxiliary vane
that moved the entire upper part of the mill. The most famous example from
the Industrial Revolution is James Watt’s flyball governor of 1769, a device
that regulated steam flow to a steam engine to maintain constant engine
speed despite a changing load.
The first theoretical analysis of a control system, which presented a
differential-equation model of the Watt governor, was published by James
Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist, in the 19th century. Maxwell’s work
was soon generalized and control theory developed by a number of
contributions, including a notable study of the automatic steering system of
the U.S. battleship “New Mexico,” published in 1922. The 1930s saw the
development of electrical feedback in long-distance telephone amplifiers
and of the general theory of the servomechanism, by which a small amount
of power controls a very large amount and makes automatic corrections.
The pneumatic controller, basic to the development of early automated
systems in the chemical and petroleum industries, and the analogue
computer followed. All of these developments formed the basis for
elaboration of control-system theory and applications during World War II,
such as anti-aircraft batteries and fire-control systems.
Most of the theoretical studies as well as the practical systems up to World
War II were single-loop—i.e., they involved merely feedback from a single
point and correction from a single point. In the 1950s the potential of
multiple-loop systems came under investigation. In these systems feedback
could be initiated at more than one point in a process and corrections made
from more than one point. The introduction of analogue- and digital-
computing equipment opened the way for much greater complexity in
automatic-control theory, an advance since labelled “modern control” to
distinguish it from the older, simpler, “classical control.”