New switched adaptive controller for the industrial tanks

Industrial environments are full of phenomena that represent enormous challenges to control engineers. Sometimes, a simple process such as the liquid level control in an arrangement of cylindrical tanks imposes several constraints that require continuous human supervision. Most of the traditional control techniques in the industry are linear, although the industrial plant is nonlinear. This fact, associated with disturbances, uncertainties in the parameters, and coupling, among others, imposes constraints on the traditional controllers, which, sometimes, allows them to show good response in a limited operation point. Thus, this work presents a robust nonlinear controller for industrial cylindrical tanks. It does not have constraints related to operation points and is robust to several industrial phenomena. To verify the performance of the proposed controller, we applied it for the quadruple tank process. The work beyond the proposed controller presents results of stability analysis and simulations.