Modelagem e controle adaptativo de uma planta didática de nível com instrumentação industrial

The control, automation and optimization areas help to improve the processes used by industry. They contribute to a fast production line, improving the products quality and reducing the manufacturing costs. Didatic plants are good tools for research in these areas, providing a direct contact with some industrial equipaments. Given these capabilities, the main goal of this work is to model and control a didactic plant, which is a level and flow process control system with an industrial instrumentation. With a model it is possible to build a simulator for the plant that allows studies about its behaviour, without any of the real processes operational costs, like experiments with controllers. They can be tested several times before its application in a real process. Among the several types of controllers, it was used adaptive controllers, mainly the Direct Self-Tuning Regulators (DSTR) with Integral Action and the Gain Scheduling (GS). The DSTR was based on Pole-Placement design and use the Recursive Least Square to calculate the controller parameters. The characteristics of an adaptive system was very worth to guarantee a good performance when the controller was applied to the plant