Design of a soft sensor for the estimation of oil temperature in Parabolic Solar Collector

The soft sensors are instrumental in inaccessible variables measurement. In this contribution, we present a new method for soft sensor design in order to estimate the temperature of oil flowing inside a pipe in Parabolic Solar Collector. The challenge in the achievement of this objective consists in the complexity of the PDE model governing temperature's evolution. To overcome this problem, an approach based on spatial discretization is adopted to provide an equivalent uncertain state space which describes accurately the original model. Subsequently, based on the uncertain model, the soft sensor is synthesized. Finally, the assessment of the proposed design is carried out through simulation tests by using real system parameters.