Detection of oscillatory control loops in irrigation channels

Abstract

In this paper the algorithm for detection of oscillatory control loops developed in Hägglund(1995) is applied to irrigation channels. The water levels in irrigation channels are controlled using mechanical gates. The controller configuration is a decentralized distant downstream scheme where a gate controls the water level upstream of the next downstream gate. The controller is a PI controller augmented with a low pass filter together with a feedforward term from the downstream gate. The algorithm is applied to real data from six consecutive reaches of an irrigation channel, and it detected the control loops that gave oscillatory response. Furthermore, due to the decentralized configuration,..