Development of Experimental Simulator via Arduino-based PID Temperature Control System using LabVIEW

Abstract

Studies on temperature control systems have been continued until today even though it has already been well established due to its growingapplications in the industrial process, household appliance for cooling/heating, and etc. With a proper tools and a detailed study, a good control system can be designed to be robust and relatively free from instabilities. For this, LabVIEW and Arduino are recommended as tools for users to express their design creativity and implement ideas on creating systems for temperature control. This is useful for educational purposes especially for university students to use in their design projects. This paper proposes a PID control scheme implemented by using an Arduino microcontroller and Virtual Instrumentation (VI) software called LabVIEW for monitoring and controlling the temperature of a heating element which is sensed by thermocouple as the measuring device. The temperature is varied accordingly to the several setpoint, and error will be generated when the measured temperature does not reach the originally set point. Experimental results show that PID controller is capable to track and control the heater temperature towards the designated reference temperature. The small scale of this system and the ease of use allows Arduino to be practical in laboratory setting and also as a teaching platform for basic control programming.