Experimental realization of a decentralized active disturbance rejection controller for a coupled tank system

Abstract

This paper presents design and real-time implementation of a decentralized active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) for liquid level regulation of a coupled tank system. To obtain a suitable feasible model of the coupled tank system, in this work system identification approach is employed. Further, based on the identified model, a decoupler has been designed to reduce the coupling effects between input and output. To validate the performance of the controller approach, a real-time experimentation is pursued on the coupled tank system. From the simulation and experimental results, it is found that the ADRC control approach requires less control action to maintain the desired level in both the tanks and also more robust as compared to the other similar reported work in literature. © 2017 IEEE.