Adaptive control of a coupled tank apparatus

This paper describes an experimental investigation of adaptive control applied to a coupled tank apparatus. The study is intended to explore several practical considerations which arise in the application of adaptive control to realistic processes. In the experiments, the apparatus was configured so as to have several difficulties found in practical systems, including unmodelled time delay, unmodelled high-frequency lag and unmodelled non-linearities. These features are studied both theoretically and experimentally. The adaptive controller is shown to perform satisfactorily in the presence of these practical difficulties. Also a comparison with other strategies for control system design is given.