The automatic control of flow in pipeline system

An automatic control technique for the flow regulation in pipeline systems is developed in the paper. The improvement for the previous work is the use of an optimal observer that reduces greatly the time of changing flow states and the adaptability for the regulation of frictionless flow. By first order Taylor-expanding equations of motion and continuity at equilibrium states, a set of linear equations are obtained then, the linear quadratic design technique in automatic control theory is used to control the flow states. In order to avoid measuring all states, an optimal state estimator is constructed. A pipeline system is taken as example. The regulation results are satisfactory. If the changes of discharges in this paper is effective for valve-motion synthesis in real pipeline systems.