Cascaded Tanks Benchmark Combining Soft and Hard Nonlinearities

The considered cascaded tanks system is a fluid level control system consisting of two tanks with free outlets fed by a pump. The input signal controls a water pump that delivers the water from a reservoir into the upper water tank. The water of the upper tank flows through a small opening into the lower tank, and finally through a small opening from the lower tank back into the reservoir. This benchmark combines soft and hard nonlinearities to be identified based on relatively short data records.All the provided files and information on the cascaded tanks system are available for download here. The zip-file contains a detailed system description, the estimation and test input-output time series data sets, and some pictures and a video of the setup. The data is available in the .csv and .mat file format.