Bond Graphs: A Unifying Framework for Modelling of Physical Systems

This chapter introduces a formalism to model the dynamic behaviour of physical systems known as bond graphs. A important property of this formalism is that systems from different domains (cf. electrical, mechanical, hydraulical, acoustical, thermodynamical, material) are described in the same way an integrated under the unifying concept of energy exchange. Bond graph models are directed graphs where parts are interconnected by bonds, along which exchange of energy occurs. We present a method to systematically build a bond graph starting from an ideal physical model and present methods to perform the causal analysis of bond graphs and procedures to generate equations to enable simulation.