Design and implementation of fractional-order PID controllers for a fluid tank system

In this paper, we investigate the practical problems of design and digital implementation of fractional-order PID controllers used for fluid level control in a system of coupled tanks. We present a method for obtaining the PI^λD^μ controller parameters and describe the steps necessary to obtain a digital implementation of the controller. A real laboratory plant is used for the experiments, and a hardware realization of the controller fit for use in embedded applications is proposed and studied. The majority of tasks is carried out by means of the FOMCON (“Fractional-order Modeling and Control”) toolbox running in the MATLAB computing environment.