Home▸Space & Astronomy▸Life Support PID Control Loop Tuner: 2D Cabin CO2 Mass Balance

Life Support PID Control Loop Tuner (2D)

Tune a real 2D PID feedback controller for a spacecraft cabin CO2 scrubber: adjust proportional, integral and derivative gains and watch the closed-loop mass balance stabilize, oscillate or saturate as crew load and setpoint change. Pan and zoom the schematic and trend graph.

Space & Astronomy2DAdvanced60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 3D version

Details

CategorySpace & Astronomy

RenderingCanvas 2D

DifficultyAdvanced

Target FPS60

ControlsKp/Ki/Kd gain sliders tune the PID controller; setpoint and crew CO2-production sliders set the target and disturbance; an Airlock CO2 Spike button injects a transient disturbance; Pause/Resume and Reset Loop control the simulation; drag to pan and scroll/pinch to zoom the schematic and strip chart, with a Reset View button.

PID controllife supportECLSScontrol theoryspacecraft automationfeedback loop2d-simulation

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Real spacecraft life-support hardware doesn't just monitor cabin air — it closes the loop with an automatic controller that decides, moment to moment, how hard to run the CO₂ scrubber. This 2D simulator implements a genuine PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controller driving a mass-balance model of cabin CO₂: crew metabolism adds gas continuously, the scrubber's actuator removes it at a rate the controller computes from the live error, its integral, and its derivative. Push the proportional gain too high and the loop overshoots and rings; push the integral gain too high and it slowly oscillates; add derivative gain to damp the swings. A scattering dot field shows cabin CO₂ density, a spinning fan icon visualizes scrubber effort, and a live strip-chart plots the concentration against its setpoint over time — exactly the tuning trade-off real ECLSS automation engineers face. Pan and zoom the schematic freely to inspect either the cabin cross-section or the trend graph up close.

⚙ Under the hood

2D companion to the 3D PID life-support model: the same discrete PID controller drives a cabin CO2 mass balance, but the cabin is now a schematic cross-section with a scattering dot field for CO2 density, a spinning 2D fan icon for scrubber effort, and a pannable, zoomable strip chart plotting concentration against setpoint — the identical control loop and math, read as a flat schematic instead of a rendered 3D scene.

PID controllife supportECLSScontrol theoryspacecraft automationfeedback loop2d-simulation

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install