Liquid flow and level control are essential requirements in various industries, such as paper manufacturing, petrochemical industries, waste management, and others. Controlling the liquids flow and levels in such industries is challenging due to the existence of nonlinearity and modeling uncertainties of the plants. This paper presents a method to control the liquid level in a second tank of a coupled-tank plant through variable manipulation of a water pump in the first tank. The optimum controller parameters of this plant are calculated using radial basis function neural network metamodel. A time-varying nonlinear dynamic model is developed and the corresponding linearized perturbation models are derived from the nonlinear model. The performance of the developed optimized controller using metamodeling is compared with the original large space design. In addition, linearized perturbation models are derived from the nonlinear dynamic model with time-varying parameters.

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This paper presents modeling and finite element analysis of a thermopneumatic micropump with a novel design that does not affect the temperature of the working fluid. The micropump is operated by activating a passive wireless heater using wireless power transfer when the magnetic field is tuned to match the resonant frequency of the heater. The heater is responsible for heating an air-heating chamber that is connected to a loading reservoir through a microdiffuser element. The solution inside the reservoir is pumped through a microchannel that ends with an outlet hole. The thermal and pumping performances of the micropump are analyzed using finite element method over a low range of Reynold's number ⩽ 10 that is suitable for various biomedical applications. The results demonstrate promising performance with a maximum flow rate of ∼2.86 μL/min at a chamber temperature of 42.5 ºC, and a maximum pumping pressure of 406.5 Pa. The results show that the developed device can be potentially implemented in various biomedical areas, such as implantable drug delivery applications.