Design and implementation of a water-based emulator of manufacturing processes

In this paper we present a prototype developed for education and research purposes. The prototype is a liquid based emulator of manufacturing network processes. In its core, the liquid-base emulator consists of several electrical pumps and liquid reservoirs. The electrical pumps emulate a manufacturing machine behavior while the liquid reservoirs serve as the intermediate product storages also called buffers. In the platform pumps and tanks can be interconnected in a flexible manner. In that way the prototype permits an easy and intuitive way of studying manufacturing control techniques and performance for several network topologies. This paper contains a detail system description and its application. Several network configurations and experimentations are presented and discussed.