Experimental verification of LPV modelling and control for conical tank system

This paper proposes an idea for developing a Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) model based control for a non-linear, time varying process, a real time Conical Tank System (CTS). In the first part of the paper, based on the open loop response of the conical tank, the whole non-linear process is split into 4 approximate linear regions and their respective transfer function models are formed from the input-output data. Since a single PI controller for whole process does not satisfy both servo and regulatory performance, a multi-model approach with four PI controllers is implemented for the process. The LPV model of the plant is obtained and it is validated with the plant data. A single PI controller designed based on the LPV model is implemented on the CTS. From the experimental results, it is proved that the performance of the LPV model based PI controller is significantly bette r than the other two control strategies.