Automatic control of irrigation canals can reduce the loss of water in considerable amounts, therefore it is generating ecologic and economic benefits. There have been many different types of automatic controllers developed, but only few of them had the opportunity of being tested on the field due to the long delay time and the inconveniences of interrupting the operation of the irrigation. Therefore, the automatic controllers developed for large irrigation canals should be tested before by means of numerical simulations and/or laboratory experiments. The Technical University of Catalonia possesses a laboratory irrigation canal with the length of 220m, with 3 motorized gates, and 11 level sensors that are connected to a SCADA system. This facility makes it possible to test controllers of any type, since all the instrumentation and real time operation runs within a flexible working environment running in Matlab-Simulink . The canal can be configured from one pool to three pools, which allows the development of multivariable control. A numerical model of the canal has been developed using the 1D hydrodynamic model SIC. With the help of this software it is possible to simulate the hydraulics of the canal and, due to the link between SIC and Matlab, also to test any controller developed previously in the Matlab environment. In this work a centralized multivariable model predictive controller for water levels is developed and validated by means of numerical simulation.

Peer Reviewed