Dr Kolawole Ogunba is an academic in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering of Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU). His area of specialisation is control engineering, a sub-discipline of engineering that designs control systems for engineering, biological and social systems. In this interview, he talked about the concept of control systems and the potential it has for national development. PAUL OMOROGBE shares the excerpts:
IN simple terms, tell us what control systems are all about.
Control, in simple terms, is about making things happen to satisfaction. Every aspect of life as we know it is achieved because some level of control is in place.
I’ll use two everyday illustrations that we can all relate to.
Let’s say I wish to fill my cup with water so I can drink a glass of water. So, what do I do? I take the empty glass and take it to a water tap. Then, I turn the water on. Gradually, water flows into the cup and the level of water in the cup goes from zero to the desired level over a period of time. Once it gets to the desired level, I turn off the water tap. What I have just done to the water in the cup is “liquid level control.”
The “controller” is the brain of the person operating the tap. The eyes are the “sensors”. Based on what the sensors tell the controller, the controller instructs the “actuator” (hands) on when to turn on the tap and when to turn it off based on how close the level of water in the cup is to the set-point.
Let us look at another everyday illustration.
Let’s say I want to take my bath the old-fashioned way using water in a bucket. So, I boil some water in a kettle and then put a larger quantity of cold water in a bucket. Then, I mix some of the hot water with some of the cold water. After mixing, I then put my hand in the water to feel the hotness of the water. If it is too hot, I add some cold water. If it is too cold, I add some hot water. I continue to do this until I have the right temperature. This second illustration is what you may call liquid temperature control.
There are many other situations of control in domestic life. Think of sugar concentration control when we wish to take a cup of tea. Think of room temperature control with air-conditioners and heaters.
The foregoing shows there is always a desire to keep various variables constrained to lie within admissible levels for life’s objectives to be achieved. This is the concept of control.
So, what is a control system? It is easy to see that any system put together to help us to achieve the control discussed above is a control system.
What is the relevance of control systems technology to Nigeria of today? How is it relevant to the man on the streets?
Now, these two questions are very interesting. I’ll start with the first question.
There are several angles from which to talk about the effects of control systems on the lives of Nigerians. I’ll discuss the effects on the domestic lives of Nigerians and the effects on the industrial activities that also ultimately affect the lives of Nigerians. The domestic and industrial effects are overlapping, since products of industrial practice are goods and services that affect domestic lives.
With respect to industrial effects, as earlier discussed, control technologies are used in the production of goods and services that Nigerians use.
We can use food manufacturing as an example. The extraction of edible parts of fruits, for example, requires the use of machines that have moving parts. These moving parts may be powered by electric motors that have to deliver speeds of translation and/or rotation of specific “set-points”.
The mixing of different food items requires “quality control”, which is another name for concentration control. (There is a reason why a particular Cola drink has a different taste from another Cola drink of another brand in spite of both drinks containing essentially the same components and this is simply the result of concentration control!).
The entire factory itself may require the installation of a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to achieve supervisory control of all the individual control systems.
From these illustrations, it is clear that the overall food manufacturing system is heavily dependent on tens or hundreds of control system design techniques. It means that every time we use a detergent or drink a cup of bottled water or carbonated beverage, we are indebted to several tens or hundreds of implemented controls in relevant factories in Nigeria and other countries from which products are imported.
With respect to domestic effects, we can look at gadgets in our homes that carry out their activities by performing control tasks. Without the consideration of control engineering, for example, the blades of an electric fan cannot rotate at a particular constant speed when set to a specific “number” that corresponds to such speed.
From these explanations, almost every activity in daily life is governed by gadgets that operate using control ideas. Also, almost every product we buy was developed directly or indirectly using control engineering ideas.
Now, why should anyone in Nigeria care? After all, we have all these gadgets and we don’t need to study control engineering to use them!
Now, that is an interesting area that will lead us to the issues we confront in Nigeria.
First, we are almost exclusively consumers of products made outside of Nigeria. This means that we do very little control engineering in Nigeria! Even industrial automation engineers in the few companies we have tend to either be expatriates or a handful of indigenous experts that have limited knowledge of control. Since the quantity of items manufactured in Nigeria is severely limited, it means we have extremely few products of control engineering to export. By implication, there will be very little foreign exchange from control engineering, and this makes our economy to be much weaker than those that actively use ideas from control engineering and other professions to create export-worthy goods and services.
Unfortunately, until we create a vibrant environment for well-trained graduates to start companies (that engage the services of capable control engineers) or get employed to use extensive control engineering knowledge to create solutions to Nigeria’s problems, our economy will continue to suffer
Talking about training, there aren’t sufficient control engineering experts in the Nigerian academia to train our students, unfortunately. To be fair, control engineering is a tough discipline to study and the lack of deep academic interest in the intricacies of control is a worldwide thing. That said, many institutions all over the world still have several professors that deal with some aspect of control or the other in research. A few Nigerians in the diaspora are researchers in Control Engineering.
However, in Nigeria, there is hardly any interest in control beyond the teaching of the basics of control by those in other specializations aside control. This means that a lot of our graduates do not have a good grasp of the practical usefulness of control. The fact that most Nigerian-born academics that are specialists in control work outside Nigeria indicates that these Nigerians require facilities and environments that support the study of this technically challenging aspect of engineering, things that Nigeria is sadly unable to provide!
What are the challenges you have observed with this technology?
This is another very interesting question that probes the feasibility of the creation and/or application of this technology in modern-day society.
The challenges encountered in the installation/implementation of control systems in Nigeria will depend heavily on the specific system being controlled.
For the appliances we use everyday, for example, since the control systems are built into such appliances, the operation of the appliances (and hence the control subsystems of such appliances) is trivial. The maintenance of such systems is also not a very difficult matter, as faulty components are usually relatively easy to identify and repair or replace by relevant professionals and artisans.
The design of the control systems for such appliances is a different matter, however. The appliances (and hence their control systems) are usually designed and constructed outside Nigeria. While the schematics and circuit diagrams of these devices may be available in some form in literature, Nigeria generally doesn’t have sufficient infrastructure and know-how to fabricate them. Even if we develop the infrastructure and know-how, Nigerians may not buy
The consequence of this is that unless comprehensive actions can be taken to create opportunities for Nigerians to create a wide variety of appliances like the Chinese do and unless the standards of such products can be sufficiently high to earn the trust of Nigerians, Nigerians will continue to import technologies from other parts of the world, even for everyday gadgets with simple circuits and connections!
For industrial control systems for the manufacturing industries in Nigeria, again, a lot of the infrastructure is imported from places like Germany, the United States, United Kingdom, China and Japan. Sadly, the fact that many companies have left Nigeria for neighboring countries like Ghana makes life more difficult for Nigerian engineers.
In summary, the main challenge of control systems in Nigeria is in the lack of know-how of the design of such systems, the absence of critical mass of academics who are control engineering experts who can sufficiently train students on the theory and practice of control engineering, the lack of employment opportunities and/or start-up platforms for control engineers to practice their profession and the overall lack of production capacity as fair as the creation of export-worthy appliances is concerned. Until these issues are holistically tackled, we will continue to simply import and use products of control engineering without being able to create our own in a consequential way.
How can the challenges be tackled?
The tackling of the challenges is actually quite simple. It simply requires the political will of our administrators and the cooperation of the citizenry to do so.
Control is a very subtle profession. It has an apparent weakness that turns out to be its strength. It is hardly ever with an identity of its own. You find control systems helping other professions to get better. For instance, we have the control of instrumentation systems, control of power systems, control of communication systems, and so on. On one hand, it appears that control cannot stand on its own. On the other hand, other specialisations cannot stand properly without control! It is peculiar enough to be carefully studied because many situations in life are sustained by concepts directly or indirectly inspired by control.
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