The Challenge
Stabilize a non-linear hydraulic plant with significant transport delays. The primary difficulty lay in characterizing the digital valve actuator and managing the dynamic coupling between valve position and tank fill rate under experimental disturbances.
The Solution
Engineered a cascaded digital control architecture. First, I modeled and validated the plant dynamics (Gp(s) to Gp(z)) using MATLAB. I then implemented a discrete position controller for the valve and a robust level regulator, validating the system strictly against theoretical response curves.