CHAPTER 1:INTRODUCTION

1.1An Introduction

Since the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century, the tendency of man has
been to depend on machines, and thereby reducing his workload, like horses
were quickly replaced by steam engines in factories and passenger trains after its
discovery and development by James Watt. As the days gone by, this tendency
has been ever increasing. The technological revolution, or, moreover, the digital
revolution in the 1970s has greatly indulged this tendency. It has now been
almost a customary for man to digitalize every technology he has ever developed,
like washing machines, air conditioners, refrigerators etc. This has made engines
and other equipments smaller, lighter and smarter and with increasing accuracy.
In recent days, there has been a significant development in the field of
automation and robotics, propelling technologies to be automated and self
sufficient.

From industrial automation, gradually it is seem that household and domestic

automation is being desired by consumers, and constant effort are being made by
the manufacturers to satisfy this increasing demand. The household fan is one of
the most common electrical appliances in our tropical country, where most
people cannot afford air conditioners. Existing domestic fan technologies include
regulator and remote controls.

Pertaining to that affinity towards automation, it would not be out of sorts to try
and automate a normal domestic fan so that it speed control would not need any
human intervention. Here, it is this idea which we have used to develop our
project. The principal objective is to control the speed of the fan (which is a single
phase induction motor), in accordance with the surrounding temperature,
automatically through a closed loop control.

So, what is closed loop control system? In this type of system, the output
response (control variable) is measured and compared with the desired value
(reference input) and the deviation (error) is given to the controller. The
controller output minimizes the deviation between the reference input and
controlled variable. The block diagram of a closed loop control system is:

Closed-loop systems have many advantages over open-loop systems. The primary
advantage of a closed-loop feedback control system is its ability to reduce a
system’s sensitivity to external disturbances, for example opening of the dryer
door, giving the system a more robust control as any changes in the feedback
signal will result in compensation by the controller.
Then we can define the main characteristics of Closed-loop Control as being:
 To reduce errors by automatically adjusting the systems input.
 To improve stability of an unstable system.
 To increase or reduce the systems sensitivity.
 To enhance robustness against external disturbances to the process.
 To produce a reliable and repeatable performance.
Whilst a good closed-loop system can have many advantages over an open-loop
control system, its main disadvantage is that in order to provide the required
amount of control, a closed-loop system must be more complex by having one or
more feedback paths. Also, if the gain of the controller is too sensitive to changes
in its input commands or signals it can become unstable and start to oscillate as
the controller tries to over-correct itself, and eventually something would break.
So we need to “tell” the system how we want it to behave within some pre-
defined limits.
1.2 Objective Realization

The fans that are the most prevalent for domestic use are usually controlled by
regulator or by remote. But, in these types of fans, the problem that arises is that
we have to vary the speed according to our requirements, manually. Now in India,
which is a tropical country, the climate is hot and humid in most parts of the
country, so the fan is essential in almost every household, as most of our
population cannot afford an air conditioner in their homes. But during late
autumn and early spring, at dawn, the surrounding remains cool and thus, during
that part of the day, the fan is required the least. So it becomes problematic for
people to wake up and switch it off, or at least to reduce its speed. Here, is where
the automatic speed control of such fans comes into play.

In this project, our objective is to break the conventional ways of operating a fan,
and to introduce automation, where the fan would adjust its speed all by itself in
accordance with the surrounding temperature. How this can be achieved is
discussed later in the project in details.
1.3 Implementation

The first step in this process is to implement the hardware. The hardware
components that we have used, apart from the single phase induction motor are
a TRIAC, a microcontroller and a temperature sensor.

Hardware

The speed control of the induction motor is done by controlling the voltage. The
voltage, in turn is controlled by the TRIAC. Now, the gate of the TRIAC is fired by a
train of delayed pulses from a microcontroller programming. A temperature
sensor we have used, that sense the temperature and gives a voltage as a output
which is input to microcontroller. For different temperature different delay will be
set by the programming. Thus firing angel of the triac can be controlled.

Software

To implement the software part, we have used Arduino programming. We have

used Arduino due to its simple and ready to use structure, and various other
advantages that has been discussed in the Project Scheme segment. The basic
logic that has been applied is that we have selected a few temperature bands,
say, Band 1 ranging from 20-24 degrees Celsius, Band 2 ranging from 25-28
degrees Celsius, and so on. Corresponding to each band, there will be a specific
speed at which the fan will rotate. When the system will sense a particular
temperature, our program will compare that temperature with the already
provided ranges, and if it lies within any one of the given ranges, then the delay
time is set and accordingly the TRIAC is fired, and the motor runs at desired
speed.
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