Adaptive Optimized Control for the prediction, guidance and optimization of thermosolar power plants at the 2nd Summit of Thermosolar Optimization

In News — May 28 2012

Prediction and guidance of thermosolar performance in operation, is one of the every-day challenges met by plant operators. At the 2nd Summit of Thermosolar Optimization (Madrid, 5th to 6th of June), TSK, ADEX and the UNED will present ‘Adaptive Optimized Control’ solutions for control problems in systems of thermal energy storage based on knowledge and practical experience of thermosolar plants.

For this purpose, simulations of the dynamic behaviour of these systems have been developed within the Matlab/ Simulink environment, providing a test bed for evaluating various control techniques including conventional PID, advanced PID, adaptive control, generalised predictive control and adaptive predictive expert control referred to also as ‘optimized adaptive control’. This latter has produced the best results due to its capacity of adapting to changes in process dynamics, and compensation for the perturbations which characterise this type of process.

In effect, the adaptive predictive expert controller has the advantage of being able to learn from the changing dynamics of the process in real time, and based on this knowledge, predict and guide the critical variables to optimize the global operation. Once the results have been verified in simulation, the next step will be the physical implementaton of adaptive optimized control in the plants which are under development by TSK.