Open physical systems, port-Hamiltonian systems

Abstract:

In this presentation, we show that the class of port-Hamiltonian systems forms the perfect class to study physical systems which interact with their environment, i.e., open physical systems. We do this for systems described by (linear) partial differential equations. After some (simple) modelling examples, we continue with the mathematical analysis of these port-Hamiltonian systems. Among other we show that existence of solutions can be very easily checked, and basically boils down to checking an energy inequality. The energy/Hamiltonian plays also a central role in proving the stabilising effect of a (dynamic) controller.