Active Disturbance Rejection Control for a Parabolic Trough Solar Field

It is challenging and imperative to achieve unbiased control for field outlet temperature of parabolic trough solar field (PTSF) as it is a critical part of solar plants but is interrupted by multiple disturbances. To tackle this problem, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is designed to alleviate these disturbances. Firstly, all the disturbances, including external disturbances, model mismatch and parameter perturbation rather than just direct normal irradiation, are lumped into one disturbance. And then, the lumped disturbance is estimated and rejected by an ADRC, where the order and gain of ADRC are determined based on an operating point of a nonlinear PTSF. The performance of the ADRC controller is also compared to 2-DOF-PID, and simulation results show remarkable merits in disturbance rejection and reference tracking of the proposed controller.