摘要：AbstractHydraulics, specifically the engineering related to river infrastructure, has had always to deal with issues as floods, erosion debilitating important civil infrastructure (bridges, etc.). In recent years it has been shown that there is predictive value for hydraulics in studying and analyzing these phenomena at a reduced scale. For this reason the microscale experimental canal was build at the Hydraulics Laboratory at the Universidad of Concepción, with a second copy for control purposes at the Control Systems Laboratory (LCS). The partial differential equations that govern the process are unnecessarily complex for control purposes. Known literature offers the alternative of a third order linear system, capturing the canal standing wave with a second order system together with an integrator to account for the mass accumulation. However, such a proposal, even when slowing the control to discard the standing wave dynamics is only valid for long canals. The microscale experimental canal does not satisfies that assumption, therefore we propose and adjust a first order structure to the process, which proves adequate for any given operating point selection. Nevertheless, the main three parameters of the plant model (gain, time constant and time delay) vary with the operating point. As a preliminary control approach we consider a plant model selection for a specific operating point as the nominal plant and adjust a PI control using the reaction curve method of Ziegler-Nichols. We compare the previous PI tuning with a predictive PI λ tuning to achieve robustness, and thus better deal (in this preliminary control approach) with the inherent variability of the plant model parameters.
