Mike Borrello, Control Systems and Simulations Specialist

Science first captured my interest and attention at the age of about five years when I first experienced a hidden world beneath the lens of a microscope. This fascination has persisted all these years and science, across multiple realms, continues to serve as the guiding direction in my life. To me science offers a world of mystery, exploration and discovery; a lure all too enticing to ignore. Connecting theory with reality through applications became my main interest, and I suppose this desire is what drew my focus and efforts to control systems engineering. Feedback systems are amazing devices. They exist all around us; not only in what man has invented, but in nature as well. It’s the role of the control systems engineer to analyze and provide explanations for how systems work, to take the reigns, and modify the way they behave to suit useful purpose. For me, the most interesting aspect of control systems engineering is modeling and simulation. Modeling not only provides a foundation and direction for controls design, but also serves as a key to help unlock the fundamental nature of systems. Modeling does require knowledge of the underlying physics and accordingly a mathematics to express them, but with the right kind of simulation tools, models can be sculptured in ways that broaden and deepen an understanding for the control scientist and a means to express his ideas to others. Thus by the proper tools and expression, simulation can transcend science into art.

Mike Borrello
Control Systems & Simulations Specialist

A Simulation Tool Like No Other

VisSim™ is a graphics based software tool for simulating dynamic systems and controls and is produced and marketed by Visual Solutions in Westford, MA. VisSim not only provides a simple and easy approach to systems simulation, but also offers the control engineer an incredibly simple interface with sensors and actuators allowing low cost hardware-in-the-loop simulations. For the control engineer, VisSim helps to solve problems through a full suite of libraries that provide a full, hybrid simulation environment of continuous and discrete time components. VisSim’s intuitive methods for the connection and configuration of functional block diagrams allow rapid construction of conceptual simulation experiments which can benefit a basic to advanced understanding of systems and controls. I strongly encourage other control engineers to explore what VisSim has to offer. My experience with other leading simulation tools has allowed me the opportunity to compare usability and performance with VisSim, and I can say without a doubt, VisSim is a simulation tool like no other. For those engineers already using VisSim, I invite you to download some of the VisSim diagrams and examples I’ve personally constructed. Just follow the 'download' link shown below.

This plot output illustrates the response of a speed controller applied to a high fidelity, 3 phase AC induction motor model simulated in VisSim. Field oriented speed control was applied using sine encoder commutation and a current model to estimate stator flux position. The simulation of the controller includes the details of space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM).
	Programming control solutions by block diagram provides a rapid means for prototyping, and simple debugging by direct visualization of structures. This block diagram, used to calculate the covariance matrix for a recursive least squares estimator was synthesized and operating in minutes time. Coding a structure of this complexity in C would normally take hours.
And speaking of simulation art ... What appears to be an actual fern leaf was generated in VisSim using an 'Iterated Fractal System' or IFS of equations. Fractals have the characteristic of self similarity, and for the fern leaf this self similarity is apparent as one views the leaf segments at finer and finer magnifications using the zoom feature in the VisSim plot block.

Links

Mission	Projects	Technotes	Control Links
Literature	Publications	Download	Adventuring

Write me at stablesystems@ieee.org
(619) 889-5452

Participant in the SETI@home project. Over 500 data sets of data processed
from the Arecibo Ground Station in Puerto Rico with over 50,000 hours of processing time.

These pages last updated Mar 3, 2007