Implementation of a block-oriented model library for undergraduate process control courses in EMSO simulator

Abstract Process control courses usually have a section of the course focused on the building of block diagrams for modeling, simulation, and analysis of open and closed loop processes. For this purpose, students are often oriented to build models using SIMULINK or XCOS because of the versatility of these powerful tools in the easy construction of mathematical models using the concept of block-oriented programming. In this paper we propose a model library built in the software EMSO that allows the user to create block diagrams for process control studies. EMSO is a powerful tool for process modeling, dynamic simulation and optimization, freely available for academic purpose. With the developed library, analysis of systems responses, even for complex processes, can be carried out and PID controller tuning tasks are made easier and less time-consuming to the students, allowing them to advance in the study of more complex control strategies such as ratio, cascade, override, feedforward, among others. Students valued the developed tool as a very useful and practical one to favor a control course learning process and between equivalent and advantageous tool when compared with SIMULINK and XCOS.