Pressure regulation in nonlinear hydraulic networks by positive controls

We report on our investigation of 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 end-users and actuators distributed along the network. After introducing the model for such a class of networks, we show how to achieve practical pressure regulation at all the end-users by proportional controllers which use local information only. In the analysis, the presence of positivity constraints on the actuators (centrifugal pumps) is explicitly taken into account. The findings are supported by experimental results.