Study and Implementation of Anti-Sloshing Control Techniques for Linear Transport of Liquids with XTS Transport System

In this thesis, the problem of suppressing sloshing dynamics for the linear movement of a cylindrical or rectangular container is addressed by designing proper control laws able to compute position, velocity and acceleration. In this research, sloshing is considered a vibration suppression problem for a second order system, and the newly controlled output dynamic allows the liquid inside the container to move with significantly less oscillation. The approximate mathematical model used to describe the liquid slosh is a linear damped pendulum. With this model, two different control techniques are designed, simulated and implemented on a real platform. The benefits and advantages of the proposed control laws are widely discussed and demonstrated with several tests in which a vision system is used to validate and confirm the differences between the controlled and non-controlled system. This thesis was developed in collaboration with Beckhoff Automation, and the tests were carried out using Beckhoff resources. In particular, hardware and the innovative drive technology, the XTS transport system, were employed.