Publications
Exergy surface shaping and thermodynamic flow control of electro-mechanical-thermal systems
Our work extends the concepts and tools of Hamiltonian Surface Shaping and Power Flow Control (HS SPFC) for electro-mechanical (EM) systems(i.e., adiabatic irreversible work processes and Hamiltonian natural systems)to Exergy Surface Shaping and Thermodynamic Flow Control (ESSTFC) for electro-mechanical-thermal (EMT) systems (i.e., irreversible work processes with heat and mass flows). The extension of HSSPFC requires the development of exergy potential functions, irreversible entropy production terms of the entropy balance equation to obtain the exergy destruction terms for inclusion in the exergy balance equation, and variational principles for producing consistent equations of motion for coupled EMT systems. The Hamiltonian for natural EM systems is an exergy potential function which leaves the development of exergy potential functions for the thermal part of the coupled models. This development is completed by integrating the exergy function over the control volume subject to the modeling assumptions. The irreversible entropy production terms are the exergy destruction terms of the exergy balance equation and the generalization of the mechanical dissipation and electrical resistance within EM systems. These generalized dissipation terms enable the derivation of a consistent set of coupled equations of motion for EMT systems. For this paper, Extended Irreversible Thermodynamics will be utilized to produce consistent thermal equations of motion that directly include the exergy destruction terms. There are several variational principles that are available for application to EMT systems. We focus on the variational principles developed by Biot and Fung [1, 2]. Furthermore, a simplified EMT system that models the EMT dynamics of a Navy ship equipped with a railgun is used to demonstrate the application of ESSTFC for designing high performance, stable nonlinear controllers for EMT systems.