Real-time implementation of self-tuning regulator control technique for coupled tank industrial process system

This article presents the self-tuning regulator control technique for a coupled tank liquid level system that often used in industry. An autoregressive with exogenous model has been used as the liquid process model with the self-tuning control implementation in order to track the desired tank level trajectories with disturbances and uncertainties of the system dynamics. The designed self-tuning controller has been sensitive to parameter variations of the nonlinear coupled tank system. The parameters of the proposed controller are periodically updated themselves during the process by means of online recursive least square method with the forgetting factor algorithm. In this way, the parameter variations and unwanted disturbances of the system are eliminated in real-time application. In order to demonstrate the efficiency of the self-tuning regulator control technique, the real-time studies have been executed. The obtained experimental results demonstrated that the proposed controller gives the better trajectory tracking performance and smaller magnitude in overshot and undershot than the designed classical proportional–integral and sliding mode controllers.