An autonomous control system for boiler-turbine units

Achieving a more autonomous power plant operation is an important part of power plant control. To be autonomous, a control system needs to provide adequate control actions in the presence of significant uncertainties and/or disturbances, such as actuator or component failures, with minimum or no human assistance. However, a reasonable degree of autonomy is difficult to obtain without incorporating intelligence in the control system. This paper presents a coordinated intelligent control scheme with a high degree of autonomy. In this scheme, a fuzzy-logic based supervisor monitors the overall plant operation and carries out the tasks of coordination, fault diagnosis, fault isolation, and fault accommodation     

Multivariable robust control of a power plant deaerator

The design of a robust controller for the deaerator of the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) that uses the linear quadratic Gaussian with loop transfer recovery (LQG/LTR) procedure is described. At present, classical proportional-integral (PI) controllers are used to control the deaerator. When the operating condition changes, the system is disturbed, or a fault occurs, and the PI controllers may fail to maintain the desired performance. A robust controller that can accommodate system faults and obtain a reasonable behavior for a wide range of model uncertainty was designed. The controller provides the desired performance despite a considerable change in the operating condition, accommodates some of the failures that can occur, and provides the choice of penalizing one variable over another. The design is tested for robustness by varying the system operating conditions and simulating a steam valve failure. The set of nonlinear simulations using the modular modeling system and the advanced continuous simulation language is included     

A decentralized controller design for a power plant using robustlocal controllers and functional mapping

This paper presents a design approach for a decentralized controller for a power plant. An electric power plant nonlinear model is decomposed into three subsystems: boiler, turbine, and generator. The interconnecting variables between the subsystems are treated as constant boundary conditions for the controller design. The local controllers are designed to be robust in order to accommodate fluctuations in the interaction variables once the overall system is considered. The drum pressure set-point is automatically obtained from the power demand through a functional mapping