Optimal Control of Above-Ground Pipelines under Dynamic Excitation

The aim of the present paper is to contribute to the research on the application of computer-controlled devices controlling the dynamic response of above-ground pipelines. To this end, the optimal control problem of above-ground pipelines loosely resting on steel saddles and undergoing strong ground shaking is studied. By applying an appropriate space discretization scheme to the continuous system and assuming that the unilateral contact between the pipe vessel and the saddle is frictionless, the dynamic behaviour of the pipeline subject to control is investigated. Then, by applying an appropriate timne discritization scheme, the state relation of the problem arising within each time step is formulated as a quadratic optimization problem, thus leading to an equivalent transformation of the initial dynamic problem into a sequence of quasi-static discrete optimal control problems. for the numerical treatment of the formulated problems, a solution scheme is proposed; an efficient quadratic optimization algorithm exhibiting the great advantage to transform the initial quadratic programming problem into a sequence of linear problems is applied to the numerical treatment of the state relation of each subproblem.

BANIOTOPOULOS Charalambos; 

1995-03-15

JRC11257

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC11257,