Design and operation problems related to water curtain system forunderground water-sealed oil storage caverns

The underground water-sealed storage technique is critically important and generally accepted for the national energy strategy in China. Although several small underground water-sealed oil storage caverns have been built in China since the 1970s, there is still a lack of experience for large-volume underground storage in complicated geological conditions. The current design concept of water curtain system and the technical instruction for system operation have limitations in maintaining the stability of surrounding rock mass during the construction of the main storage caverns, as well as the long-term stability. Although several large-scale underground oil storage projects are under construction at present in China, the design concepts and construction methods, especially for the water curtain system, are mainly based on the ideal porosity medium flow theory and the experiences gained from the similar projects overseas. The storage projects currently constructed in China have the specific features such as huge scale, large depth, multiple-level arrangement, high seepage pressure, complicated geological conditions, and high in situ stresses, which are the challenging issues for the stability of the storage caverns. Based on years’ experiences obtained from the first large-scale （millions of cubic meters） underground water-sealed oil storage project in China, some design and operation problems related to water curtain system during project construction are discussed. The drawbacks and merits of the water curtain system are also presented. As an example, the conventional concept of “filling joints with water” is widely used in many cases, as a basic concept for the design of the water curtain system, but it is immature. In this paper, the advantages and disadvantages of the conventional concept are pointed out, with respect to the long-term stability as well as the safety of construction of storage caverns. Finally, new concepts and principles for design and construction of the underground water-sealed oil storage caverns are proposed.

Safety stabilization of switched systems with unstable subsystems

This paper is concerned with the problem of safety stabilization for switched systems where the solvability of the problem under study for individual subsystems is not assumed.A new state-dependent switching strategy with guaranteed dwell-time for switched systems is constructed,and a sufficient condition for absence of Zeno behavior is derived.Also,a novel switched control design method is proposed to simultaneously guarantee the safety of the switched closed-loop system and stabilize the system based on the union of a common barrier function and a single Lyapunov function,which effectively handles the conflict between safety and stability objectives.Finally,two examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design approach.

Safe formation control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles:control design and safety-stability analysis

Both safety and stability are primary performance criteria for multi-unmanned aerial vehicle(multi-UAV)systems in many coordination tasks.Existing approaches often consider safety and stability separately.It is necessary and urgent to develop a safety-stability control strategy to merge these two performance criteria.In this paper,a unified approach is developed to consider safety and stability for multi-UAV formation control.The stability criterion is represented by a Lyapunov function and safety criterion is represented by a barrier function and then a relaxed converse control Lyapunov-barrier theorem is obtained.With the help of a relaxed converse control Lyapunov-barrier function(RCCLBF),a distributed safety-stability formation control strategy is proposed for the multi-UAV system.By transforming the solution of RCCLBF to a Lyapunovlike stabilization problem,we show that the proposed formation control strategy can drive the UAVs staying within a specified safe set.Simulation results are provided to validate the proposed safety-stability formation control strategy.