Time scaling internal state predictive control of a solar plant

The control of a distributed collector solar field is addressed in this work, exploiting the plant's transport characteristic. The plant is modeled by a hyperbolic type partial differential equation (PDE) where the transport speed is the manipulated flow, i.e. the controller output. The model has an external distributed source, which is the solar radiation captured along the collector, approximated to depend only of time. From the solution of the PDE, a linear discrete state space model is obtained by using time-scaling and the redefinition of the control input. This method allows overcoming the dependency of the time constants with the operating point. A model-based predictive adaptive controller is derived with the internal temperature distribution estimated with a state observer. Experimental results at the solar power plant are presented, illustrating the advantages of the approach under consideration.