Control of Water Supply Network System

Abstract

An increasing demand for water due to population growth, industrial development and improvements if condition require the enhanced management of water transfer and the improvement in the operation of water supply systems. This paper considers the application of a simple and robust controller to improve the behavior of the water supply system, to maintain stable operation of the water flow rate, and to reduce the operational cost by manipulating pump speed. The proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller is one of the most common automatic control system that has a wide spread application in process industry. Variant PID controller tuning techniques are investigated and applied to the water supply system. These techniques are Ziegler-Nichols method, and a recent new technique that is based on the knowledge of parameters obtained from the plant step response. The results show that the latter technique gives improved performance over the Ziegler-Nichols method.