Programmable Control Systems in BOSfluids

Piping systems frequently involve automatic control systems that adjust flow elements in response to changes in the flow conditions or to external events, such as timer switches. Setting up such control systems is a non-trivial task as the optimal control parameters tend to depend strongly on the piping system properties. Simulation is a very helpful tool here as it can greatly reduce the time and costs to set up a control system.

The upcoming BOSfluids release will help you do just that as it will provide extensive support for simulating control systems. Although this support comes with the somewhat usual building blocks, including sensors, transfer functions and controllers, it differs in the way that these can be combined.

That is, instead of providing a fixed set of connections between these building blocks, you can combine them by writing arbitrary control rules in the form of user-defined subroutines.

This provides you with an enormous amount freedom to implement control systems that range from trivial switches to sophisticated PID controllers. In addition to that, BOSfluids will enable you to simulate control systems without having to perform a full flow analysis.