Control-orientation, conservation of mass and model-based control of compressible fluid networks

Abstract: We study a gas network flow regulation control problem showing the closed-loop consequences of using interconnected component models, which have been designed to preserve a variant of mass flow conservation without the inclusion of algebraic constraints into the dynamics. These are candidate \textit{control-oriented} models because they are linear state-space systems. This leads to a study of mass conservation in flow models and the inheritance of conservation at the network level when present at each component. Conservation is expressed as a transfer function property at DC. This property then is shown to imply the existence of integrators and other DC structure of the network model, which has important consequences for the subsequent control design. An example based on an industrial system is used to explore the facility of moving from modeling to automated interconnection or components to model reduction to digital controller design and performance evaluation. Throughout, the focus is on the teasing out of control orientation in modeling. The example shows a strong connection between the modeling and the controller design.