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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Balancing temporal shortages of clean energy with natural gas for the generation of electricity is a challenge for dispatchers. This is compounded by the recent proposal of blending hydrogen with natural gas as an interim means of reducing harmful emissions. This talk will present an optimal control formulation for transmitting heterogeneous mixtures of natural gas and hydrogen through a network of pipelines. The formulation is derived for general gas networks that can inject or withdraw arbitrary time-varying mixtures of gases into or from the network at arbitrarily specified nodes, under the influence of time-varying compressor and regulator control actions. Modeling the transmission of a mixture of two gases doubles the size of the state space and increases the nonlinear complexity. It will be shown that heterogeneous mixtures present unforeseen challenges for numerical simulation, hence optimization, in the sense of potentially chaotic dynamics. This talk will also detail the reduction of optimization run time by initializing the nonlinear program to be the linearized solution instead of the steady-state solution.Bio: Luke Baker is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University and a student employee in the T-5 Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His current research interests are in the design of deterministic and stochastic methods for computing, controlling, optimizing, and estimating the dynamics of interconnected energy infrastructures.
Host: Anatoly Zlotnik