On Monday, June, 8th ,2026 the department of Mechatronics engineering at Al-Khwarizmi College of engineering held a master thesis defense titled “Proportional Hydraulic Directional Control Valve Using PLC” for the master candidate (Mariam Ali Karim) at the thesis defense hall, where a degree of passing with distinction was awarded for her research findings.
The committee is composed of the following members:
- Professor Dr. Abthal Abd al-Razzaq Mahmood, Chair
- Assistant Professor Dr. Hisham Hasan Jasim, Examiner
- Lecturer Dr. Wail Rashid Abd al-Majid, Examiner
- Professor Dr. Mahir Yahya Sallum, 1st Supervisor
- Assistant Professor Yasar Nuri Laftah, 2nd Supervisor
This thesis aimed at developing an advanced control strategy for a proportional hydraulic directional control valve operated by a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), which is considered one of the key components in electro-hydraulic systems due to its direct influence on control accuracy and system response.
A complete electro-hydraulic elevator system was designed and modeled using MATLAB/Simulink to represent the system dynamics and evaluate its performance. To enhance system efficiency, modern optimization techniques, namely Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Cheetah Optimization (CO), were employed to optimally tune the PID controller parameters. This resulted in improved response time, reduced settling time, and minimized steady-state error.
In the practical stage, the optimized control strategy was implemented using a PLC integrated with a Human-Machine Interface (HMI) to achieve real-time control and monitoring of the system. The optimized PID parameters obtained from the optimization stage were applied to the actual system, and a comparison was conducted between the experimental and simulation results to validate the effectiveness of the proposed optimization algorithms.
The results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves superior performance in terms of stability, accuracy, and dynamic response under different loading conditions when compared with conventional PID tuning methods. These findings confirm the effectiveness of the developed methodology in enhancing the performance of electro-hydraulic systems.
