Considerable amounts of water can be saved by automating irrigation canals. The design of most of the practical automatic controllers rely on a simplified model of the irrigation canal. This model can be obtained from measured data (identification) or can be formulated (white box models) assuming simplifications in the physical concepts and using the canal geometry. Several models of this kind are presently available. Moreover, short canals reveal a resonance problem, due to the back and forth of waves. This paper is focused on how to choose a suitable model for short canal pools with the purpose of control design. Four simple models are applied to two different types (resonant and non-resonant) of short canals: First order transfer function based on the Hayami model, Muskingum model, Integrator Delay (ID), and Integrator Delay plus Zero (IDZ). Model predictive controllers are developed based on these models and they are tested numerically and experimentally in order to evaluate their contribution to the control effectiveness. The controllers based on the ID and IDZ model showed the best performance.
a b s t r a c tIrrigation or drainage canals can be controlled by model predictive control (MPC). Applying MPC with an internal model in the presence of unknown disturbances in some cases can lead to steady state offset. Therefore an additional component should be implemented along with the MPC. A new method eliminating the offset has been developed in this paper for MPC. It is based on combining two basic approaches of MPC. It has been implemented to control water levels in the three-pool UPC laboratory canal and further numerically tested using a test case benchmark proposed by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). It has been found that the developed offset-free method is able to eliminate the steady-state offset, while taking into account known and unknown disturbances.
Urban drainage networks should be designed and operated preferably under open channel flow conditions without flux return, backwater, or overflows. In the case of extreme storm events, urban pluvial flooding is generated by the excess of surface runoff that could not be conveyed by pressurized sewer pipes, due to its limited capacity or, many times, due to the poor efficiency of surface drainage systems to collect uncontrolled overland flow. Generally, the hydraulic design of sewer systems is addressed more for underground networks, neglecting the surface drainage system, although inadequate inlet spacings and locations can cause dangerous flooding with relevant socio-economic impacts and the interruption of critical services and urban activities. Several experimental and numerical studies carried out at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and other research institutions demonstrated that the hydraulic efficiency of inlets can be very low under critical conditions (e.g., high circulating overland flow on steep areas). In these cases, the hydraulic efficiency of conventional grated inlets and continuous transverse elements can be around 10–20%. Their hydraulic capacity, expressed in terms of discharge coefficients, shows the same criticism with values quite far from those that are usually used in several project practice phases. The grate clogging phenomenon and more intense storm events produced by climate change could further reduce the inlets’ performance. In this context, in order to improve the flood urban resilience of our cities, the relevance of the hydraulic behavior of surface drainage systems is clear.
Reliable prediction of time-varying pollutant loads in combined sewer systems during storm periods can aid better management of the release of pollution into natural environments as well as enhancing storage tank design. Better understanding of the behaviour of sewer sediments is crucial for the development of models that adequately describe the transport of in-sewer solids and accurately predict the changes in pollutant concentration within combined sewers during storm events. This paper reports on the results of a test programme to examine the erosion of highly organic sewer sediment under the application of time-varying shear stress. The tests were carried out with and without supplying oxygen, and varying simulated dry-weather periods. The aim was to investigate the behaviour of real in-sewer sediment with a high organic content (around 80%) in an attempt to improve prediction of the transport rates under the particular Mediterranean conditions of long dry-period/build-up and intense rainfall/wash-off, and understand how this environment affects the erosional resistance and subsequent sediment release. Results have been compared with previous work on lower organic content sewer sediments and artificial organic sediment.
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