Compensation of control-loop interaction for power plant wide-range operation

Power plants are being required to undertake large power variations to satisfy electricity demand, whereas their control systems comprise decentralized control loops and ad-hoc compensation schemes, to deal with loop interaction, for regulation and disturbance rejection at base load. This paper presents a compensation scheme that lessens control loop interaction, caused by the nonlinear coupled process dynamics, to ease power generation control throughout the power plant operating space. Compensation factors are systematically determined from a process gain matrix that conveys all interaction information. Numerical analysis and simulation experiments demonstrate the feasibility of power plant wide-range operation with the proposed compensator.