Nonlinear Control – Exercise 10

Exercise 10 – Passive Systems

10.1 Passivity of an electric circuit

Given the electrical circuit depicted below with linear components.

i Rin L iL

iC

u C uC R

a) Identify the states (the choice is not unique – which possibilities are there?) and give an expression for the
sum of the stored electric and magnetic energy.

b) Write down the linear state differential equation in the form

ẋ = Ax + bu.

c) Express the current i, extracted from the ideal voltage source, in terms of the system state x and the input
u (voltage of the ideal voltage source).

d) Show that the system with the current i as output y is passive with respect to the total energy as storage
function.

10.2 Port-Hamiltonian state representation

Express the model of the electric circuit in port-Hamiltonian form

ẋ = (J − R)∇H(x) + gu
y = g T ∇H(x),

where H(x) represents the total stored energy and the interconnection and damping matrices have the prop-
erties J = −J T and R = RT ≥ 0.

 T
a) Use the state vector x = iL uC .
 T
b) Use the state vector x = ψL qC with ψL = LiL the magnetic flux linkage and qC = CuC the electric
charge.

c) Compare the canonical passive outputs y = g T ∇H(x) for both alternatives. Describe their relations to
the passive output in the first exercise.

© PD Dr.-Ing. habil. Paul Kotyczka 1

Chair of Automatic Control
Technical University of Munich