Controlling Liquid Height within Two Tanks in Series

Using a PID Controller

Consider two tanks in series; the dynamic behavior of their heights is governed by the
ODEs:
,
,
where is the height of tank in meters, (set to 1 here) is the area of each tank in
, is the inlet flow rate (the manipulated variable) into the first tank, and and are
the outlet flow rates (expressed in
) from the first and second tank, respectively. The
initial height of the liquid in each tank is assumed to be 0.25 meters.
The flow equation is given by
where
expressed in
). It is assumed that

or and is the valve constant

and
.

The setpoint for the height of the liquid (the process variable) in the second tank is
chosen to be 3 meters.
The inlet flow rate is varied in order to achieve the desired setpoint value using P, PI, or
PID (proportionalintegralderivative) control:
where
is the error,
is the proportional gain, and
and differential time constants, respectively.

and

,
are the integral

For very large and

, one recovers the usual proportional control, which is usually
characterized by a small offset value (i.e., the final steady state height is not exactly
equal to the setpoint value).
PI control is achieved when is taken equal to zero. PI control can show an overshoot
and dumped oscillations around the setpoint. No offset is observed and the final steady
state tank height is equal exactly to the setpoint value.
The most general case is when
second tank's height.

and

is not too large; one gets PID control of the

The Demonstration plots the height of both tanks as a function of time; the blue curve
displays
and the magenta curve represents
.