LQG/LTR Control of the Distributed Collector Field of a Solar Power Plant

Abstract

This paper describes a LQG/LTR controller for a solar distributed collector field. When designing a LQG controller it is easy to take into account the trade-off between quick response and avoiding oscillations which is typical of many control problems. The improved robustness reached with the loop transfer recovery LTR allows for good behaviour of the resulting system even when the working conditions are far from the ones the LQG controller has been designed for. The controller also employs serial compensation to cope with measurable external disturbances. The real resulting behaviour is shown by means of experimentation on the plant.