Adaptive PI Control of an Organic Rankine Cycle Power Plant

In this paper a PI based adaptive control system is developed to control an organic Rankine cycle power plant. In particular, the control of the turbine speed during the transient between the normal operation mode of the system (connected to the grid) and the island-mode (connected to a stand-alone load) is of main concern. A control algorithm suitable for the implementation on a programmable logic controller is developed. The designed controller is adaptive with respect to different plant thermodynamic boundary conditions and takes into account the limitations imposed to the control variable. An object oriented simulator of the system is developed and the controller is tuned via simulation.