FUZZY SUPERVISOR OF PID CONTROLLERS FOR THE ACUREX FIELD AT PSA

A. Cardoso, J. Henriques and A. Dourado

CISUC - Centro de Informtica e Sistemas da Universidade de Coimbra Departamento de Engenharia Informtica Plo II da Universidade, Pinhal de Marrocos, 3030 COIMBRA PORTUGAL Email: { alberto, jh, dourado}@dei.uc.pt Phone: +351 39 790000 Fax: +351 39 701266

Abstract
Solar power plants are characterised by the fact that the primary energy source, the solar radiation, varies throughout the day causing changes in plant dynamics which leads to distinct several main operating points. Therefore it is difficult to obtain an acceptable performance over the total operating range with a fixed controller. This paper presents the investigation of a fuzzy switching supervisor PID control strategy to the distributed collector field of a solar power plant at the Plataforma Solar de Almera (Spain). The fuzzy supervisor technique, using measured actual data available from the plant, provides a way to switch between several fixed PID controllers, a priori tuned with a neural network strategy. To deal with the effects of fast and unexpected deviations on inlet oil temperature the introduction of a feedforward compensator is also investigated. Simulation and experimental results are presented showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Keywords: Solar power plants; Fuzzy supervisor; Switching PID control; Neural networks.

1. INTRODUCTION
The main control requirement in a solar power plant is to maintain the outlet oil temperature of the collector field at a constant pre-specified value, to be used for power production. The fundamental feature of the plant is that its primary energy source, the solar radiation, can not be influenced by the control system. Moreover, since the solar radiation changes substantially during the plant operation, due to the daily solar cycle, atmospheric conditions, such as a cloud cover, humidity and air transparency, it is seen that significant variations in the dynamic characteristics (e.g., the response rate and the time delay) of the field, corresponding to different operation conditions, occur. Therefore, it is difficult to obtain a satisfactory performance over the total operating range with a fixed controller. To deal with these difficulties some authors have proposed the use of adaptive control techniques (Camacho et al., 1992; Pickhardt and Unbehauen, 1994; Pickhardt and Silva, 1998; Coito et al., 1997). Others have suggested intelligent control techniques, like neural networks, fuzzy systems or linguistic controllers (Arahal et al., 1997; Rubio et al., 1995; Berenguel et al., 1997; Juuso et al., 1997). Another possible alternative could be the commissioning of a switching controller using different models of the plant for the different operating points (Rato et al, 1997). A similar strategy is followed here. There are several ways to design a controller for each local model. Traditional PID controllers have some well known advantages. They are simple to implement, they can successfully regulate many industrial processes with various specifications in some nominal operating conditions and they can assure reliability based on possible stability studies (French et al., 1992; He et al., 1993). To improve the performance of the PID controllers, several strategies have been proposed, such as adaptive and supervising techniques. One can consider the following main reasons for using a supervisor (Ketata et al., 1995): (i) firstly, adaptive

controllers are able to cope with the most of the cases that leave the PID under-optimal, but they require specialised design methods using some a priori model structure knowledge (Oliveira et al., 1991); PID supervisors are easier to implement because they need very little knowledge about the process; (ii) secondly, the combination of a linear PID control law with a supervisory strategy can lead to a highly non-linear control law, increasing the robustness of the control system (Babuska and Horacek, 1992). One possibility to implement the supervisor is the fuzzy logic methodology which has been considered as an effective tool to deal with disturbances and uncertainties in terms of vagueness, ignorance, and imprecision. In this work a control strategy based on the PID control design with a fuzzy logic switching supervisor is presented. The supervisor is built upon a Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy to implement the on-line switching between each PID controller, according to the actual measured conditions. The local PID controllers have been previously off-line tuned, with a neural network approach, that combines a dynamic recurrent non-linear NN model with a pole placement control design. The number of local controllers, to be employed by the supervisor, was reduced, using the c-Means clustering technique. Since the main disturbances are accessible, they can be applied to improve the controller performance. In some of the previous work a feedforward compensation term, assessed through the static behaviour of the plant, is suggested to compensate the effects of the radiation and the inlet oil temperature (Camacho et al., 1992; Berenguel et al., 1997). Coito et al. (1997) show experimental results for the case when these disturbances are included in the design of a predictive MUSMAR-controller. In this work a dynamical term to compensate the effects of inlet oil temperature is investigated. The paper is organised as follows: in section 2 the fuzzy switching supervisor and the feedforward technique are

presented. A classification technique, that reduces the number of candidate controllers and the neural network approach employed to design the PID controllers, are also described in this section. In section 3 some simulations and experimental results are presented in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. The main conclusions are summarised in section 4.

ST =

{T

ref

, T ( T ref )

T ref T

(5)

The membership functions, considered triangular, are shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3.
I(I rad )
Very Small Small Normal 1.0 Large Very Large

2. CONTROL METHODOLOGY
2.1 - Fuzzy Supervisor To formulate the design problem it is assumed that it is possible to represent the plant dynamics by a number of characteristics behaviours M 1 ,M 2 , . ., M N and that, for each M i , a corresponding model Pi may be derived, where each Pi is called a nominal model. In order to obtain a desired performance when the plant is operating under conditions M i , it is assumed that a nominal controller C i , can also be designed. The overall structure of the fuzzy switching supervisor PID control is shown in Figure 1. The fuzzy supervisor consists of three stages: the fuzzification, the fuzzy rule base and the inference procedure. The first one converts the numerical values of the solar radiation, I r a d , and the reference temperature, T ref , which mainly define the nominal operating points, into linguistic variables. The fuzzy rule base defines the switching control strategy. The selected controller is obtained by the defuzzification part, which chooses among rules that have been fired simultaneously.
T ref
F RB D
F - Fuzzification RB - Rule Base D - Defuzzification
230.0 240.0 250.0 260.0 270.0 600.0 700.0 800.0 900.0 1 000.0

Irad - W/m 2

Figure 2 - Solar Radiation Membership function.

T(T ref )
Very Small Small Normal 1.0 Large Very Large

Tref - C

Figure 3 - Reference Temperature Membership function.

The rule base, that defines the strategy of how to do the switching between controllers, is drawn in Figure 4.
Solar Radiation (W/m
VS SM NO LA
2

)
VL

Irad Tref
VS

600 230 240 250 260 270 C1 C6 C11 C16 C21

700 C2 C7 C12 C17 C22

800 C3 C8 C13 C18 C23

900 C4 C9 C14 C19 C24

1000 C5 C10 C15 C20 C25

Reference Temperature (C)

SM NO LA

VL

Irad

Figure 4 - Switching Supervisor Rule Base.

Fuzzy Switching Supervisor

I rad
Ci
C1

T in

The inputs, assumed to characterise the actual nominal condition of the solar plant, are the solar radiation and the reference temperature. The output, C i i =1, . ., 2 5 , is the index that identifies the select controller. In general a Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy system (Takagi and Sugeno, 1985) is described by a set of rules (6), where X and Y are fuzzy sets in the antecedent, is a general nonlinear function and z is a crisp value.
Rule i: IF ( x is X ) A N D ( y is Y ) T H E N z = ( x , y ) (6)

T ref -

C2

Q in

T out

CN

PID Controllers

Acurex Field

Figure 1 - Schematic diagram of fuzzy switching supervisor PID control.

The universes of discourse I and T , respectively for the solar radiation and reference temperature, are defined by (1) and (2).
I

The switching supervisor rule, depicted in Figure 4, can be translated into a Takagi-Sugeno type by (7)
Rule i : IF ( I rad is SI
(i)

[ 600 W /m
T

, 1000 W / m

[ 230 C , 270 C ]

) A N D ( T ref is S T ( i ) )

(1) (2)

T H E N i = I (i) (I rad )* T (i) ( T ref )

(7)

where

i =1, . .,2 5

and

SI

( i)

and

ST

(i)

define,

For each variable five linguistic terms are considered (3):

{ V S , SM , N O , L A , V L }= { V ery Small , Small , N ormal , L arg e , V ery L arg e }

SI =

respectively, the linguistic values of variables I r a d and

T ref for the i
th

(3)

rule. The variables I ( i ) ( I r a d ) and

The fuzzy sets SI and S T are defined as a set of ordered pairs by (4) and (5).

T ( i ) ( T ref ) define the respective membership degree. The

aggregation of the consequents of the fired rules, determine

{ I rad , I ( I rad )

I rad I

(4)

 i = m a x = m a x { 1 , . .,2 5 } .

i , which identifies the controller to be selected, such that

Figure 5 Simplified Supervisor Rule Base.

2.4 - Feedforward Control The distributed solar collector field is a particular process where the main disturbances, the solar radiation and inlet oil temperature, are measurable. Since the supervisor strategy takes into account to the solar radiation values only the compensation of the inlet oil temperature disturbances is considered here. The feedforward term is calculated based on the static feedforward relationship (11) (Berenguel et al., 1993).
Q in = 0 .7 8 6 9 I r a d 0 .4 8 5( T ref 1 5 15 ) 8 0 .7 . T ref T in (11)

2.2 - PID Tuning with Neural Networks Neural networks (NN) have been successfully applied for modelling non-linear systems (Jin et al., 1995). In this work, the ability of a recurrent Elman network (Pham and Xing, 1995) to approximate a discrete time non-linear system is employed to obtain each nominal model Pi , i =1, . ., 2 5 . An Elman network is described by the equations (8), (9) and (10):
x h(t) =
c

{W

x c ( t ) + W u Q in ( t 1)
c

(8) (9) (10)

x (t ) =

x ( t 1) + x ( t 1)
h y h

Tout (t) = W x (t )

where t is a particular discrete time, ( ) is a hyperbolic tangent non-linear function, x c ( t ) is the context unit and
x ( t ) can be seen as an estimated state. The context units
h

The dynamical feedforward compensator, includes a low-pass filter and a delay term, is given by the following expression (12):

Q in ( q 1 ) T in ( q 1 )
where
G (q
1

= G ( q 1 ) F ( q 1 ) D ( q 1 )

(12)

are locally recurrent and a multiplicative constant, , decreases the values as they are fed back. This constant determines the memory depth, i.e., how long a given value fed to the context unit will be remembered. The interconnection matrices, W
W
y u

) =

0 .7 8 6 9 I r a d 0 .4 8 5 ( T ref 1 5 15 ) 8 0 .7 . ( T ref T in )
1 f1 + f 2 q 1 1+ g1 q
2

(13)

1, n

, W

n ,n

and

F( q

) =

and

D(q

) = q

-9

(14)

n ,1 , which define the interconnection paths for the

context-hidden layer, input-hidden layer and hidden-output layer respectively, are evaluated from the truncated Werbos backpropagation through time algorithm (Werbos, 1990). From the non-linear neural model, equations (8), (9) and (10) it is possible to derive a linear model by computing the derivatives from the output, T out , with respect to the input
Q in , extracting the actual linearised parameters (Henriques

3. RESULTS
3.1 Fuzzy Supervisor Simulation The effectiveness of the developed approach was tested using the non-linear distributed parameter model of the Acurex field, developed at the University of Sevilla (Berenguel, et al., 1993). This first simulation intended to show the behaviour under several changes in the points of operation. From the results shown in Figure 6 it can be seen that the proposed strategy is able to perform well with these nominal conditions variations. It can be concluded that it performs according to its design: it has to select the adequate controller for each operating point, what really happens. The selected controller, computed by the fuzzy supervisor, and the solar radiation are shown in Figure 7.
C l/s

and Dourado, 1998). Following this approach, a discrete time linear model can be derived in the form of a standard discrete time state space equations (a second order system, n = 2 , is considered). Based on this linear model, the PID parameters can be easily computed from a pole placement law. 2.3 - Clustering The purpose of clustering is to classify a given data set into homogeneous groups of data. The c-Means clustering algorithm (Bezdek, 1981) is applied here to group the controllers which have parameters with similar values. The data set to be classified is the parameters of the nominal PID controllers C i , i =1,K,2 5 , the number of clusters (distinct controller classes) considered was 7. The final rule base, which defines the supervision task, is now on Figure 5 .
Solar Radiation (W/m2)

Tout
250

Tref

12.5

200

10

150

Qin
7.5

100

600 230
Reference Temperature (C) C5 C5 C7 C7 C6

700
C5 C1 C5 C2 C7

800
C2 C5 C1 C4 C1

900
C6 C2 C4 C3 C4

1000
C6 C2 C2 C4 C3
50 10 11 12 13 14 Hours 2.5

240 250 260 270

Figure 6 - Simulation using the switching strategy.

W/m2 800 700

C7

Ci

Irad
7 6

W/m 2

Irad
750

600 500 400 300 200 100 10 11

C1 C1 C2 C5 C5 C4 C5

T in
700 175

5 4 3 600 2 1 550 10 11 12 13 14 15 Hours 650

150

12

13

14

Hours

Figure 7 - Solar radiation and selected controller.

Figure 9 - Solar radiation and inlet oil temperature.

3.1 - Experimental Results The experimental results shown here, were carried out in the Acurex Solar Collectors Field of the Plataforma Solar de th th Almera (PSA), on 6 and 7 of July, 1998. The controller was implemented in C code and operates over a software developed at PSA (Lpez, 1996), also in C code. In the experiment the sampling time considered was 15 seconds and the output temperature considered, T o u t , is the average of the temperature at the outlet of the loops. The dynamic feedforward term was not considered in the experiments . Figure 8 and Figure 9 show the experimental results obtained on 6th of July, 1998. As can bee seen the behaviour is quite good. The response presents almost no oscillations neither overshoot and settles for the new value of the reference temperature in about 15 minutes. In order to show the rejection capabilities of the proposed switching control, a change in the inlet oil temperature was introduced at instant 13h25m. The disturbance rejection capabilities of the controller were also acceptable (note that the feedforward term was not introduced.).
C 250 l/s

The experiment 2 was carried out on 7th of July, 1998. The results can be seen in Figure 10 and Figure 11.
C 250

Tref Tout

l/s

200

10

150

Q in

7.5

100

5.0

50 11 12 13 14 15 Hours

2.5

Figure 10 - Experiment 2 - 7th of July.

At instant 14h55m a collector loop were suppressed from the field and added again at instant 15h12m. After an initial phase the outlet oil temperature achieves the reference temperature. The results are very acceptable in face of the different operating points and the addition/suppression of a collector loop.
W/m2 C

Tref T out
10

200

950 900

Irad

Q in
150

7.5

850 800

200

100

5.0
750

Tin
700

175

50 10 11 12 13 14 15 Hours

2.5
650 11 12 13 14 15
Hours

Figure 8 - Experiment 1 - 6th of July .

Figure 11 - Solar radiation and inlet oil temperature.

3.3 - Simulation with the Feedforward Term In section 2.4 a strategy for compensate inlet oil temperature disturbances is presented. This simulation intends to verify the improvement of the systems performance with this compensation. Observing the experiment 1, Figure 8, an inlet oil temperature disturbance was introduced at instant 13h25m. In Figure 12 the same situation is reproduced (in simulation). T1out and represents, respectively, the simulation output

Q1in
oil

temperature and input oil flow without the feedforward term and T out and Q in the respectively variables when the feedforward term is introduced.
C

240

T2out Tref

220

T1 out

200

180

Tin

160

140

l/s 8

Q 2 in

Q 1in

13

13.2

13.4

13.6

13.8

14

Hours

Figure 12 - Simulation with the feedforward term.

As can be seen the behaviour is quite good. For a variation of c.a. 50 C in the inlet oil temperature, the outlet temperature holds within a narrow band of variation. So, this response confirms the expected disturbance rejection capabilities of the controller.

4. CONCLUSIONS
A fuzzy switching supervisor strategy of PID controllers and a feedforward compensator, using accessible disturbances, were presented to the distributed collector field of a solar power plant The process is characterised by different operating conditions, depending on the changes in dynamics caused by variations of the solar radiation, reference temperature, and plant characteristics. A set of different PID controllers has been designed using a neural network methodology, off-line trained. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed switching strategy. Simulations studies have been presnetd in the presence inlet oil temperature disturbances. By introducing a feedforward term, an improvement in the performance of the closed loop system has been achieved. Acknowledgements
The experiments described in this paper were carried out within the project Innovative Training Horizons in Applied Solar Thermal and Chemical Technologies, ERBFMGECT950023, supported by the European Union Program Training and Mobility of Researchers and promoted by CIEMAT-IER. The authors would like to express their gratitude to the personnel of the Plataforma Solar de Almera, in particular Pedro Balsa, who was nominated to take care of this project. This work was partially supported by the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Technology (MCT), under program PRAXIS XXI.

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