The Cascade Control of Natural Gas Pipeline Systems

With the boost of natural gas consumption, an automatic gas pipeline scheduling method is required to replace the dispatchers in decision making. Since the state space model is the fundamental work of modern control theory, it is possible that the classical controller synthesis method can be used for the complicated gas pipeline controller design. In this paper, a cascade control algorithm is proposed based on the state space model that is used for the transient flow simulation of the natural gas pipelines. A linear quadratic regulator is designed following the classical optimal control theory. Finally, the transient process with different control methods shows the effectiveness of the cascade control using information of the entire pipeline. According to the hardware configuration of natural gas pipelines, automatic scheduling process is ready to deploy as one step to the intelligent natural gas pipelines.