Modeling and control of a rotating channel

The modeling and control of a rotating channel, used in a steel company to convey steel bars coming out from the last stand of the rolling train to the cooling bed, is described. We deal with the problem of synthesizing a controller in order to satisfy the performance needed for the real application. To this aim a lumped parameters model is first derived and subsequently a time-varying control scheme is presented. The derived control has been successfully tested on an accurate ad-hoc developed simulator of the plant, which captures the major issues arising in the specific problem.