GUB EEE Students Gain Hands-On Experience in Industrial Automation & PLC at IUT

A team of students from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Green University of Bangladesh, attended a full-day hands-on workshop on industrial automation held on 2 August at Islamic University of Technology, Gazipur, and conducted by Ulterior Engineering with Mr. Fahim Hossain (IUT EEE '18). The session showed how a plant is actually controlled rather than simply how it is drawn. Automation proved to be a stack of controllers rather than a single one sensors and actuators reacting in milliseconds at the field level, PLCs running the machine logic above them, and DCS, RTU, IPC and DDC systems taking over when the problem becomes a refinery, a pipeline network or a building's HVAC all tied together by Ethernet, Modbus, MQTT and wireless links. 

Participants programmed a Delta PLC in ladder logic using WPLSoft 2.52 and built the operator screen in DOPSoft 4.00.16, which made the scan cycle clear: the PLC reads its inputs into memory, runs the program top to bottom, writes to the outputs and repeats in a few milliseconds, and that loop is what turns a ladder drawing into a working program. On the motor side, direct-on-line and star-delta starting were compared, the protective role of the overload relay was demonstrated, and variable frequency drives were shown to have replaced both in pumps, fans, conveyors and lifts by varying frequency and voltage together for smooth starts and lower energy use. The session also covered how HMI and SCADA divide the work of watching a plant, and how quickly the data accumulates roughly 300 readings a minute, about 43,200 in a day which is precisely why IoT and AI analysis have become part of the conversation. 

The day closed with a live conveyor demonstration that counted boxes, detected metal and ejected it with a pneumatic pusher, followed by a career briefing on how wide the field has become for EEE graduates. Registration fee was 500 BDT per participant, of which each student paid 250 BDT and the remaining 250 BDT per seat was funded by the Green EEE Club. Thanks are due to the Department of EEE at IUT for hosting, to Ulterior Engineering and Mr. Fahim Hossain for the instruction, and to the Green EEE Club for covering half of every seat.