Pressure Regulation in Nonlinear Hydraulic Networks by Positive and Quantized Controls

We investigate an industrial case study of a system distributed over a network, namely, a large-scale hydraulic network which underlies a district heating system. The network comprises an arbitrarily large number of components (valves, pipes, and pumps). After introducing the model for this class of networks, we show how to achieve semiglobal practical pressure regulation at designated points of the network by proportional control laws which use local information only. In the analysis, the presence of positivity constraints on the actuators (centrifugal pumps) is explicitly taken into account. Furthermore, motivated by the need of transmitting the values taken by the control laws to the pumps of the network in order to distribute the control effort, we study the pressure regulation problem using quantized controllers. The findings are supported by experimental results.