Decentralised pi control of an open water channel

Abstract

In this paper we consider decentralised PI control of the water levels in an irrigation channel. The water levels are controlled using overshot gates located along the channel, and the output of the controllers is the head over gate. This choice of manipulated variable is advantageous since the head over gate is directly related to the flow over the gate. The PI controllers are augmented with a first order low pass filter in order to ensure a low gain at the resonant wave frequency. A distant downstream controller configuration with feedforward is used. In this configuration a gate controls the water level immediately upstream of the next downstream gate. The controllers are tuned based on s..