Feedforward Control of Solar Thermal Power Plants

Abstract

In recent years the problem of controlling the temperature of oil leaving an array of parabolic trough collectors has received much attention. The control schemes developed have in general utilized a feedback control loop combined with feedforward compensation. The majority of the published papers place the emphasis almost entirely on the design of the feedback control loop. Little or no attention has been paid to issues involved in the design of the feedforward controller. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance by concentrating upon the design and development of a feedforward controller for the ACUREX distributed solar collector field at the Plataforma Solar de Almeria. Different methods of combining feedback and feedforward will be assessed and experimental results will be presented in order to support any theoretical observations made.