Conservative Systems with Ports on Contact Manifolds

In this paper we propose an extension of port Hamiltonian systems, called conservative systems with ports, which encompass systems arising from the Irreversible Thermodynamics. Firstly we lift a port Hamiltonian system from its state space manifold to the thermodynamic phase space to a contact vector field with inputs and outputs. Secondly, we define a more general class of contact vector field (called conservative system with ports) generated by a function corresponding to the power of a physical system and illustrate it on a simple example of irreversible system. Copyright c ©2005 IFAC