Optimal supervisory control of steam generators operating in parallel

Vicente Costanza and Pablo S. Rivadeneira

Energy, 2015, vol. 93, issue P2, 1819-1831

Abstract: A supervisory control working as a ‘dynamic feedback’ is substantiated for optimally allocating demands to a group of n boilers in parallel. The set-points to each conventional controlled boiler are continuously changed while: (i) minimizing a combined cost, which is cumulative in time and takes into account the dynamics of all individual boilers, and (ii) generating a strategy that can cope with general disturbances, like changes in fuel composition and noisy measurements, i.e. with differences between the predicted and the measured values of the variables. The structure of the problem results in a 2n affine-linear model subject to a quadratic cost, and the resulting optimal control is also affine-linear with time-dependent coefficients, which do not depend on the total vapor demand. The methods are tested with a two case studies for 2 and 3 boilers. It is shown that this dynamical supervisory control leads to savings of at least 10% relative to nontrivial piecewise-constant strategies.

Keywords: Supervisory control; Optimal control; Multilayer boilers; Closed-loop identification; Boiler control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544215013821
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:93:y:2015:i:p2:p:1819-1831

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2015.10.018

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().