Experimental Validation of Graph-Based Hierarchical Control for Thermal Management

Abstract

This paper proposes and experimentally validates a hierarchical control framework for fluid flow systems performing thermal management in mobile energy platforms. A graph-based modeling approach derived from the conservation of mass and energy inherently captures coupling within and between physical domains. Hydrodynamic and thermodynamic graph-based models are experimentally validated on a thermal-fluid testbed. A scalable hierarchical control framework using the graph-based models with model predictive control (MPC) is proposed to manage the multidomain and multi-timescale dynamics of thermal management systems. The proposed hierarchical control framework is compared to decentralized and centralized benchmark controllers and found to maintain temperature bounds better while using less electrical energy for actuation.