Robust controller design for multiple boilers and boiler turbine units
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2012
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Boilers or boiler turbine units are the main source of energy for almost every industrial
installation. In most cases, the fuel cost of a power plant is a key factor in the total budget of
any industrial unit. Also the major part of the running expense of any plant consists of the
total fuel expense of a power plant. Due to this fact, the control of boilers and boiler turbine
units confirm their significance. Improving the performance of a power plant and making it
cost-effective becomes extremely important for engineers.
Over the last few decades, power plant control has been the focus of attention for academic
researchers, scientists and control engineers. Many innovative control techniques have
been experimented with on boilers. It is seen that in order to meet the vast utility demand
of the plant, more than one boiler or boiler-turbine unit is usually installed ·in a power plant.
The control of such a system becomes sensitive due to the mutual dependency and
interactions between one unit and another. The research reported in this thesis mostly
focuses on implementing control systems with multiple boilers and multiple boiler turbine
units. Hoo robust controllers are designed for systems where multiple boilers and boilerturbine
units are installed and operate in parallel to each other. These controllers maintain
power and steam supply in the presence of sudden changes in process parameters and
external disturbances in the power plant.
These days due to the vast usage of steam in a production unit, power plants consist of
more than one boiler. Furthermore control of this kind of system becomes extremely
sensitive when the plant is subjected to frequent variations in operating conditions. A loop
shaping technique is used to synthesise robust controllers for the set point tracking,
disturbance rejection and robust stability of the system against variations of the operational
conditions and nonlinearity of the plant. Designed robust controllers are of high orders and,
compared to PID controllers these are still not the industry favourite . That is why, to make
the controllers in this study industrial favourable, these higher-order controllers are reduced
to approximate the multivariable PID controllers structure. This is done for practical
implementation by using eigenvalue decomposition technique. Simulation results show that
the resulting PID structure displays a good robust stability and performance in the time
domain, achieving steam demand and electricity demand from the boiler header and power
grid stations for multiple boilers and multiple boiler-turbine units system.
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