A Control Strategy to Balance Efficiency and Reliability for Pump System

In this paper, a model composed of pump and valves used to achieve flow rate regulation is built. A control strategy to improve reliability and efficiency of the pump-valve system is introduced. An optimizer and a controller are developed. The optimizer will calculate the pressure loss across the valve and the head of the pump to limit the operation point of the pump to nearby the design point. The controller manages the control of flow rate and the pressure loss across the valve. The controlled variables of the control system are flow rate and the pressure loss across the valve, the control variables are the speed of pump and the lift of valve. This makes the system a coupled nonlinear Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) system. A differential geometry method is introduced to decouple the MIMO system. The result of the control strategy is shown in simulations. The difference between traditional PID method and the new method is compared. The result shows that the new method sacrifices power consumption for a better reliability. This paper provides an option to improve reliability of pump systems.Copyright © 2014 by ASME