Dynamics and solutions to some control problems for water-tank systems

Abstract

We consider a tank containing a fluid. The tank is subjected to directly controlled translations and rotations. The fluid motion is described by linearized wave equations under shallow water approximations. For irrotational flows, a new variational formulation of Saint-Venant equations is proposed. This provides a simple method to establish the equations when the tank is moving. Several control configurations are studied: one and two horizontal dimensions; tank geometries (straight and nonstraight bottom, rectangular and circular shapes), tank motions (horizontal translations with and without rotations). For each configuration, we prove that the linear approximation is steady-state controllable and provide a simple and flatness-based algorithm for computing the steering open-loop control. These algorithms rely on operational calculus. They lead to second order equations in space variables whose fundamental solutions define delay operators corresponding to convolutions with compact support kernels. For each configuration, several controllability open-problems are proposed and motivated.