control of parabolic trough solar plant with model predictive controller

This paper presents a hierarchical control structure that has been applied to control the outlet oil temperature of solar parabolic trough plants. This should be achieved through changes in the field oil flow, non-manipulated energy source, the physical constraints of the system and multiple input disturbances such as solar radiation, inlet oil temperature and ambient temperature. These factors also are in the system model parameters that are changing constantly, so the system will be varying time. In lower layer for temperature control, the mathematical model is obtained by differential equations and then the model system being piecewise linear and finally linearization model is discretized and the linearization model is used based on the model predictive control method for control the temperature of the solar collectors. Another major challenges in solar power plants, regulate to reference temperature related to effective factors of the system is due enhancing the efficiency and reducing the human error. Therefore the fuzzy logic controller has been utilized for this purpose in the upper layer. The control algorithm is validated with real data taken from the Alice springs Airport station in springs (Australia). The simulation results show the performance of fuzzy logic in the creation of the reference temperature and model predictive controller in tracking the reference temperature.