The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is considered one of the countries with the highest consumption of electric energy per capita. Moreover, during the period of 2007–2017, the consumption rate increased from 6.9 MWh to 9.6 MWh. On the other hand, the share of residential electricity consumption in the KSA constitutes the biggest portion of the total electric consumption, which was about 48% in 2017. The objectives of this work were to analyze the exergy and assess the economic and environmental impacts of energy consumption in the residential sector of the Qassim region to determine potential areas for energy rationalization. The consumption patterns of 100 surveyed dwellings were analyzed to establish energy consumption indicators and conduct exergy analysis. The performances of different consuming domestic items were also examined, and energy efficiency measures are proposed. The average yearly consumption per dwelling was determined, and the total energy and exergy efficiencies are 145% and 11.38%, respectively. The average shares of lighting, domestic appliances, water heaters, and air conditioning from the total yearly energy consumption were determined.

Systems dynamics and automatic control is classified as one of the toughest courses in the college of engineering at Qassim University according to the statistical analysis of the final grades. This motivated us to think about a new approach to teach this course by extending the design term project to include experimental part beside the theoretical analysis. This approach has become feasible due to the publicity of the low-cost microcontrollers such as the Arduino in the recent years. In this paper, we present our experience in conducting Arduino-based projects and how we used them to support the teaching of all the automatic control subjects in the course such as the mathematical modelling, the stability analysis, the controller design and the implementation of the PID controller. It was found that the new approach improves the attention and the overall performance of the students in the course which was reflected in the students’ marks in the quizzes and exams. Moreover, it motivated the students to be creative by utilising the control theory to design new systems that can be useful for their local community.

Quadrotor flying vehicles with suspended loads have a lot of applications, such as mine detection and transferring loads for delivery, or through places where ground vehicles cannot reach. In these applications, the payload will be suspended underneath the vehicle and it is subjected to large oscillations due to external disturbances or the acceleration of the vehicle itself. These oscillations add additional forces and moments to the quadrotor, and this deteriorates its performance and stability. In this paper, we developed a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation platform for a quadrotor with a suspended load system using Gazebo. The developed platform can be used to understand the dynamics of the system and design control systems to suppress the oscillation of the suspended load. An anti-swing controller that is based on time-delayed feedback of the load swing angles is implemented in the designed HIL environment to show the usefulness of the newly developed system and the effectiveness of the anti-swing controller.

The development of multirotor vehicles can often be a dangerous and costly undertaking due to the possibility of crashes resulting from faulty controllers. The matter of safety in such activities has primarily been addressed through the use of testbeds. However, testbeds for testing multirotor vehicles with suspended loads have previously not been reported. In this study, a simple yet novel testing platform was designed and built to aid in testing and evaluating the performances of multirotor flying vehicles, including vehicles with suspended loads. The platform allows the flying vehicle to move with all six degrees of freedom (DOF). Single or three-DOF motions can also be performed. Moreover, the platform was designed to enable the determination of the mass properties (center of mass and moments of inertia) of small multirotor vehicles (which are usually required in the development of new control systems). The applicability of the test platform for the in-flight performance testing of a multirotor vehicle was successfully demonstrated using a Holybro X500 quadcopter with a suspended load. The test platform was also successfully used to determine the mass properties of the vehicle.

In this work, we propose a systematic procedure to design a fuzzy logic controller (FLC) to control the lateral motion of powered parachute (PPC) flying vehicles. The design process does not require knowing the details of vehicle dynamics. Moreover, the physical constraints of the system, such as the maximum error of the yaw angle and the maximum allowed steering angle, are naturally included in the designed controller. The effectiveness of the proposed controller was assessed using the nonlinear six degrees of freedom (6DOF) mathematical model of the PPC. The genetic algorithm (GA) optimization technique was used to optimize the distribution of the fuzzy membership functions in order to improve the performance of the suggested controller. The robustness of the proposed controller was evaluated by changing the values of the parafoil aerodynamic coefficients and the initial flight conditions.