A Unifying Passivity-Based Framework for Pressure and Volume Flow Rate Control in District Heating Networks

A fundamental precondition for the operation of district heating networks (DHNs) is a stable hydraulic behavior. However, the ongoing transition toward a sustainable heat supply, especially the rising integration of distributed heat sources and the increasingly meshed topologies, introduces complex and potentially destabilizing hydraulic dynamics. In this work, we propose a unifying, equilibrium-independent passivity (EIP)-based control framework, which guarantees asymptotic stability of any feasible, hydraulic DHN equilibrium for a wide range of DHN setups covering different DHN generations, meshed, time-varying topologies, and multiple, dynamically interacting distributed heat sources. The obtained results hold for the state of the art as well as future DHN generations featuring, for example, multiple distributed heat sources, asymmetric pipe networks, and multiple temperature layers.