Nonlinear control of coal-fired steam power plants

This work proposes a nonlinear control strategy for steam power plants that efficiently controls the superheated steam temperature while accommodating large and frequent variations in power demand. The variables to be controlled are the pressure in the boiler, power generation, and superheater/reheater temperatures. The proposed strategy decomposes the overall plant into three separate subsystems and applies decoupling with deadtime compensation for each one of them. The derived strategy is implemented within a MATLAB/Simulink environment for different setpoint tracking and disturbance rejection cases, showing excellent performance and robustness.