Courses:

Special software is required to use some of the files in this section: .m and .xls.

Make something your own: I ask you to propose a topic for a paper by submitting a title and one paragraph that describes what you intend to cover and accomplish. After we agree on the topic, you will do the reading, calculation, and writing that leads to your paper.

Topics may vary widely according to your interests; for example,

• Survey of control problems peculiar to some industry
• How control valves work
• Control systems in cellular function
• Controlling processes that show inverse response
• Comparison of several controller tuning methods
• How pulse testing is done

Try for the personal benefit of gaining some expertise, and see if that fits into about ten double-spaced pages of text. The paper is likely to follow this outline, but modify it if the topic could be better presented some other way:

• Introduction - the context, starting general and focusing down to…
• Objective - the particular topic addressed in the paper
• Literature review - what the experts have to say on the topic
• Discussion - your synthesis, comparison, criticism, application of the source material
• Calculation - an exam problem on this topic that you pose and solve
• Conclusion - what you have learned from all this
• Reference list - the sources that you cited - 3 minimum