Master Intership proposal Modelling and Controller design of a micro-canal

On-site
- Douai, Hauts-de-France, France

Job description

Discipline : CERI Systèmes Numériques

Line Manager : Eric DUVIELLA

Workplace : Douai

Type of contract and duration : Stage

CONTEXT :

Public establishment belonging to IMT (Institut Mines-Télécom), placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, IMT Nord Europe has three main objectives: providing our students with ethically responsible engineering practice enabling them to solve 21st century issues, carrying out our R&D activities leading to outstanding innovations and supporting territorial development through innovation and entrepreneurship. Ideally positioned at the heart of Europe, 1 hour away from Paris, 30 min from Brussels and 1h30 from London, IMT Nord Europe has strong ambitions to become a main actor of the current industrial transitions, digital and environmental, by combining education and research on engineering and digital technologies.

Located on two main campuses dedicated to research and education in Douai and Lille, IMT Nord Europe offers research facilities of almost 20,000m² in the following areas:

Digital science,
Energy and Environment,
Materials and Processes.

For more details, visit the School’s website : www.imt-nord-europe.fr

The CERI Digital Systems (Teaching, Research and Innovation Centre - DS at the Institut Mines Télécom Nord Europe (https://research.imt-nord-europe.fr/digital-systems/) conducts academic and technological research focus on data, from collection and processing to decision-making.

BRIEF:

Hydrographical networks are large scale systems composed of natural rivers and artificial canals. They are used to answer Human’s needs in terms of irrigation, navigation, drinking water, industry. As environmental systems, they are disturbed by several factors due to Human’s activities and extreme climate events. Control strategies have been designed to reject these disturbances and guarantee the management objectives. It consists in controlling hydraulic devices (gates, weir, pumping stations), which allow to dispatch water to guarantee the needs and avoiding floods. Based on accurate model, the advanced control strategies could be implemented for an efficient management of hydrographical networks.

To deal with the design and test of controllers, a micro-canal device has been developed in the CERI SN (see picture). It is a laboratory canal of 5m with one reach and two controlled gates. It is equipped with level sensors. An interface between the Beckhoff PLC, Twincat and Matlab is available.

Objectives

The main objectives consist in i) modelling the dynamics of the micro-canal by considering several operating modes, ii) identifying a dynamical model of the gates, iii) proposing controllers (PID, LQ, MPC…).

The modeling step and the design of controllers have to deal with the characteristics and complex dynamics of the canal, i.e. nonlinearity, variable delays, waves, attenuation, unsteady modes, etc. Given the inherently complex nature of canals, designing controllers by assuming linear dynamics may not be sufficient. Hence, the step aims at dealing with multi-models and multi-controllers. Based on an accurate model, control algorithms, such a Model predictive control (MPC), should be employed to guarantee the management objectives, as it offers a number of features that are suitable to deal with real hydrographical networks.

The methods will be developed in MATLAB.

Key-words

Canal, Hydrographical networks, Modelling, Control algorithms, Model Predictive Control.