The
Click here to see the video of the device in action.
Vir­tu­al Cou­pled Tanks sys­tem (VCT) rep­re­sents a phys­i­cal imple­men­ta­tion of an indus­tri­al liq­uid lev­el con­trol process where the liq­uid tanks are emu­lat­ed by means of LCD screens.

The unit can work in stand­alone mode, or be con­trolled from a PC run­ning appro­pri­ate soft­ware. The process is mod­eled on an embed­ded device using pre­cise math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els. The device itselt can be seen as an inter­me­di­ate step between pure soft­ware sim­u­la­tions and real-life con­trol objects, as it pro­vides the phys­i­cal pre­sense of a cou­pled tanks sys­tem, yet requires no main­te­nance as a real-life device would.

The device is patent­ed¹¹A. Tepl­jakov, E. Petlenkov, and J. Belikov, “Vir­tu­al cou­pled tank sys­tem,” Eston­ian Patent P201 400 045, 2017.. Depict­ed here is a pro­to­type built accord­ing to a spe­cif­ic con­fig­u­ra­tion: it has two inter­con­nect­ed tanks. It is of course pos­si­ble to build such sys­tems with cus­tom con­fig­u­ra­tions on demand for the pur­pos­es of student/control engi­neer training.