Design of a H ? Robust Controller with ? -Analysis for Steam Turbine Power Generation Applications

Vincenzo Iannino, Valentina Colla, Mario Innocenti and Annamaria Signorini
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Vincenzo Iannino: TeCIP Institute PERCRO Laboratory, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, via Alamanni 13B, Ghezzano, 56010 Pisa, Italy
Valentina Colla: TeCIP Institute PERCRO Laboratory, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, via Alamanni 13B, Ghezzano, 56010 Pisa, Italy
Mario Innocenti: Department of Information Engineering, Università di Pisa, via G. Caruso 16, 56122 Pisa, Italy
Annamaria Signorini: General Electric Oil & Gas, via F. Matteucci 2, 50127 Firenze, Italy

Energies, 2017, vol. 10, issue 7, 1-31

Abstract: Concentrated Solar Power plants are complex systems subjected to quite sensitive variations of the steam production profile and external disturbances, thus advanced control techniques that ensure system stability and suitable performance criteria are required. In this work, a multi-objective H ? robust controller is designed and applied to the power control of a Concentered Solar Power plant composed by two turbines, a gear and a generator. In order to provide robust performance and stability in presence of disturbances, not modeled plant dynamics and plant-parameter variations, the advanced features of the ? -analysis are exploited. A high order controller is obtained from the process of synthesis that makes the implementation of the controller difficult and computational more demanding for a Programmable Logic Controller. Therefore, the controller order is reduced through the Balanced Truncation method and then discretized. The obtained robust control is compared to the current Proportional Integral Derivative-based governing system in order to evaluate its performance, considering unperturbed as well as perturbed scenarios, taking into account variations of steam conditions, sensor measurement delays and power losses. The simulations results show that the proposed controller achieves better robustness and performance compared to the existing Proportional Integral Derivative controller.

Keywords: Concentrated Solar Power plants; steam turbine; robust control; H-infinity; structured singular value; Proportional Integral Derivative controller (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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