Local Automatic Control Modes in an Experimental Irrigation Canal

The paper presents twolocal PI automatic control modes developed,tuned and verified in an experimentalautomatic canal. The canal was used as aphysical model and it will support furtherstudies on canal automation domain. Thecontrol algorithms are installed in localPLC's with the objective of controlling thewater depths immediately upstream anddownstream of the corresponding checkgates. The strategy adopted to tune the PIcontrollers was to compare the frequencyresponse of the state space model, whichrelies on the linearized Saint-Venantequations, with a simple model consideringeach canal pool as a reservoir (reservoirmodel). The obtained results for thecontrol gains were validated by fieldtests. A few simulation results are alsopresented as well as the experimentalfacility and the main configuration of theSCADA developed for the canal supervisionand monitoring.