Computer-based temperature controller in an energy-conservative manner

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to develop a computer-based temperature controller for use on board the NASA Space Shuttle for micro-gravity experiments. To meet the requirement of energy conservation and other system specifications, an improved ON-OFF type control scheme which includes a proportional-integral (PI) controller and a pulse-width modulator has been investigated. The comparison of the authors' control algorithm, signal transfer technique and power conversion analysis with that of a conventional controller are presented. Computer implementation, including system hardware and software, are described in this paper. Finally the system performance is illustrated through experiment results.<>