PhD Research planning

Design and Construction of Liquid Level Measurement System

IBEZIM VITUS ONYEKA

INTRODUCTION

Our World today thrives on technological advancements and developments. One of such
advancements is the evolution of computers and its related technologies, which makes it
possible to confront new challenges and develop new techniques in industrial liquid level
measurement and control.

Liquid level control and measurement has a wide industrial application in manufacturing,
chemical processes, agro-allied, water treatment, pharmaceutical processes, etc. The demand
for accurate and repeatable process level measurement has made this a major concern for
process engineers. In these industries, liquids is pumped into tanks, pumped between tanks and
stored in tanks of different shapes, sizes and configurations. This makes the level control and
flow between tanks a key problem in the process industry.

According to Rahmat and Rozali (2008), Level control is the control of one of the system
variable but very intricate as it is usually in most control loops (single and sometimes multi-loop
level control) in process control. Level control usually requires a feedback to the control system
which can be achieved using some technologies to measure or sense the level of liquid. Some
of the available technologies include differential pressure transmitters, ultrasonic transmitters
and capacitive probes, microwave radar sensors, etc. (Kielb, et. al., 1999).

Liquid level control is of dare importance in industries as rightly mentioned above. Many
industrial processes need to maintain quality; product specifications and safety by controlling
liquid level within set points. Many control methods like classical PID, DOF PID, auto tuning
PID, fuzzy logic PID, etc. have been used to solve the challenges posed by liquid level and flow
control. The consequence of ignoring level control was evident in the disaster that occurred in
Bounce field (Boonsrimuang, 2009).
It is noteworthy to mention that liquid level control is all around us, from medical physiology
which involves bio fluid control systems, which control the rate of blood flow in the human body
to the simple water closet toilet in homes (which uses floater system to control liquid level). It is
then imperative for control system engineers to have a good understanding of level and flow
control to develop efficient methods to control them. Thus having a good grasp and
understanding on of liquid level control can further improve lives of humanity beyond the
process industry.

BACKGROUND OF PROJECT
This project will be on liquid level control of a coupled-tank system, which will consists of two
tanks connected together via a valve. The tanks will be mounted on a reservoir and drain
directly into the reservoir through a flow valve beneath it.

The control of the liquid level will be achieved using feedback control system to control the
pump so that the level of liquid in tank 1 will be maintained at set values. PID control is widely
used in the industries to control liquid level and will be employed in this project.

There are many existing methods for control liquid level ranging from the conventional
Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control as well as Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) to the very
simple control methods like the ON/OFF control.

In this project a couple tank system will be use and PID control implemented from a MATLAB
program on a computer. The tank will interacts with the digital computer and vice versa via a
DAQ system.

1.3 PROBLEM STATEMENT

In our world today computers are used extensively to aid humans in automatic control which is
robust and very reliable and less prone to errors. However the computer has to be programmed
with a suitable program. Computers are currently used to implement PID algorithms to control
systems (Ang and Chong, 2005). MATLAB is used in this project to program and implement the
PID controller.

PID controllers are widely used however they have to be tuned to achieve the desired out. This
can be challenging for a high order system and system with large time delay. There are a
number of tuning methods for PID, however they need experience to monitor and tune the PID
parameters to achieve desired objectives (Ang and Chong, 2005).
To control liquid level in real time, continuous data acquisition as a feedback will need to be
feed to the program. A LabJack U12 will be used to interface the computer to the analogue tank.

Flexibility of control will always be desired, especially to freedom to tune the gains of the PID
parameters without halting the process in real time to enter set points and control parameters
from an Excel spread sheet.

1.4 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

The aims and objectives of this project include:

1. To control liquid in Tank 1 of the two coupled Tanks to within +/-1mm of the set point
value
2. To have a user interface to enter set point values on a Personal Computer (PC).
3. To implement PI and PID control within the system
4. To develop a mathematical model which accurately describe or matches the response of
the physical system
5. Ability to update set points and controller parameters without halting the program.

1.5 SCOPE OF PROJECT

This project scope is broken into four parts which are:

1. Design and construction of an amplifier interface circuit:

An interface circuit will be designed and built to connect the tank apparatus and Data
Acquisition device.
2. Design of the controller for the tank system:
This will involve the design of an appropriately tuned PID and PID controller with MATLAB
software. Excel will be used to set PID parameters as well as set point for better
performance.
3. Study and characterisation of the tank Apparatus valve and pump:
Experiments will be carried on the pump and valve to determine the inflow and outflow rates
respectively which will be used in the combination with the derived mathematical model for
the simulation of the tank system.
4. Derivation of the mathematical model:
This will involve the development of a mathematical model that represents the couple-tank
system control apparatus. This model is based on the Bernoulli’s principle from fluid
dynamics and the principle of conservation of energy.
 5. Simulation and analysis of the simulation response and physical system response:
Simulation of the mathematical model with the experimental results will be carried out using
MATLAB software and compared with the response of the physical tank system.

LITRATURE REVIEW

Kangwanrat, et. al. (2010) in their paper presented a design methodology of auto adjustable PI
controller; they used Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) technique for controlling
coupled tanks. They developed closed loop controller with parameters which could be updated
to change the response of the coupled tank system. The output from tank system was
compared to a desired response from a reference model and the control parameters were
update based on this error. The technique was shown to adjust the PI controller parameters in
response to changes in plant and disturbance and with specifies properties of the desired
control system. The experimental results showed that MRAC techniques can solve the dynamic
problems of coupled tanks.

Ho, et. al. (2002) reported a system of Iterative Feedback Tuning (IFT) incorporated into relay
auto-tuning of PID controllers. In their research, the PID controller was auto tuned to achieve
specified bandwidth and phase margin. The limitation of standard auto relay auto tuning
technique was eliminated by using the Ziegler-Nicholas formula for tuning PID controller. They
further explained that by using common modelling assumptions on the earlier mention relay
system, analytical derivatives of IFT algorithm can be derived. Test on the algorithm showed a
good tuning result.

Bhambhani and Chen (2008) in their research on three different configurations of tuning the PI
controller on water level control in coupled tanks compared tuning methods such as Ziegler-
Nichols, modified Ziegler-Nichols and Fractional Integral Gain Optimization (FMIGO). The plant
was mathematically modelled, plant parameters identified and the controller designed and
simulated using SIMULINK and finally compared to the real-time system. Their results showed
that the Fractional order- Proportional-Integral, FO-PI was better in terms of percentage
overshoot and the overall system response of the system in the face of nonlinearities due to
valves, sensors and pumps.

Ewald and Page (2000) explained that coupled tanks can be controlled remotely over the
internet. In their experiment, a coupled tank apparatus was connected to http-based client
server system to remotely control the system using any method of control such as PID, fuzzy
logic, etc. LABVIEW was used to acquire the necessary data and in addition to web camera,
was used as a graphical User Interface (GUI).

Teng et al. (2003) in their experiment showed a simple Genetic Algorithm (GA) method of real
time online auto-tuning PID parameters of a liquid level system. According to Teng et. al.
(2003), that the proposed system is able to choose the best PID parameter for each generation
and a real-time liquid level system is used to analyse the chromosomes by measuring the error
signals, which means that for each chromosome evaluation, trial run of the liquid level control
system is needed.

Zhao (2010) in his paper, adopted fuzzy logic and applied it to control the PID controller of a two
container water tank to eliminate the limitations of conventional PID controller. The system was
characterised by nonlinearity and time-varying parameters. MATLAB software was used to
simulate the controller system and it showed that the fuzzy PID had better performance in
response speed, static accuracy and more.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This project will starts with having a clear and good understanding of a coupled tank system.

This project will involve simulation of the real (physical system) as well as actual control of the
real system. In other to control the real system two interfacing circuits will be required. The
project flow chart is shown below in figure 3.1
Figure 3-1 project flow chart for controller hardware and software development

This chart shows the project as divided into two parts, the hardware and software development
stages. The software development stage will cover the writing of appropriate MATLAB codes
algorithm that will control the level of liquid in the tank to a desired set point with the ability to
update the set point without halting the program as well developing a simulation of the system
with appropriately written MATLAB codes. MATLAB and excel software will be used to analyze
the results for the characterization of the tank characteristics.
The second part will cover the hardware development stage. In this stage, an interface amplifier
circuit will be design and built and assembled with the LabJack, computer hardware peripherals
and tank to ensure that the project run smoothly.

After that the different stages will be integrated to run and test the whole system. The sensor will
be calibrated and the control software using firstly PI control and later PID control algorithms
control implemented and observed in real time using MATLAB software. The simulated results
will be compared with the results obtained from above.