On the Existence and Uniqueness of Steady State Solutions of a Class of Dynamic Hydraulic Networks via Actuator Placement

In this paper, using tools from graph theory we provide verifiable necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique hydraulic equilibrium in district heating systems of meshed topology and containing multiple heat sources. Even though numerous publications have addressed the design of efficient algorithms for numerically finding hydraulic equilibria in the general context of water distribution networks, this is not the case for the analysis of existence and uniqueness. Moreover, most of the existing work dealing with these aspects exploit the equivalence between the nonlinear algebraic equations describing the hydraulic equilibria and the KKT conditions of a suitably defined nonlinear convex optimization problem. Differently, this paper proposes necessary and sufficient graph-theoretic conditions on the actuator placement for the existence and uniqueness of a hydraulic equilibrium, independent of the actuators' control objective. An example based on a representative district heating network is considered to illustrate the key aspects of our contribution, and an explicit formulation of the steady state solution is given for the case in which pressure drops through pipes are linear with respect to the flow rate.