Free-surface oscillations control of high speed manipulated liquids

In this paper, we first propose an equivalent mechanical model to estimate the liquid oscillations in a partially filled container in an industrial packaging process. The purpose of this study is to control the height of the liquid inside the container during and after a high speed manipulation. No measurements are available in real-time, the levels are measured on a testbed via a camera. Several treatments are applied to the pictures to extract the heights of liquid. In order to satisfy various control specifications based on this equivalent mechanical model such as manipulation-time, constraints of liquid height and motor acceleration, a predictive controller is then designed to determine the position reference which is applied apply to the motor. The resulting control is used in open-loop into the process.