Hydraulic Parameter Estimation in District Heating Networks

Abstract: Using hydraulic models in control design in district heating networks can increase pumping efficiency and reduce sensitivity to hydraulic bottlenecks. These models are usually white-box, as they are obtained based on full knowledge of the district heating network and its parameters. This type of model is time-consuming to obtain, and might differ from the actual behavior of the system. In this paper, a method is proposed to obtain a grey-box hydraulic model for tree-shaped district heating systems: hydraulic parameters are estimated based on pressure measurements in only two locations. While previous works only estimate parameters related to pressure losses in pipes, this work also includes customers valves in the grey-box model structure, an important inclusion for control-oriented applications. Finally, a numerical example illustrates the proposed method on a small district heating network, showing its ability to obtain an accurate model on the basis of noisy measurements.