Development of laboratory experiments for control and power systems: The water -tank experiment

Control system design is needed in many application areas such as manufacturing, automotive systems or power systems. Hence, a thorough education including practical experience is very beneficial for engineering students. In view of this, the thesis develops a water level control experiment for control laboratories. The system is designed to allow system modeling, set-point linearization and the application of various controller design algorithms both in continuous time and in discrete time. The thesis consists of two main parts. In the practical part, guidelines for the choice of system components such as pressure sensor, amplifiers, motor driver and water pump for the water tank system are given and supported by hardware experiment. In the theoretical part of the thesis, different variants of the water level control system are studied, and control methods such as pole placement, root locus, symmetrical optimum, Youlaparametrization and disturbance feed forward are applied. All these experiments are validated by simulations in Matlab/Simulink.