Intelligent Tuning of the Two Degrees-of-Freedom Proportional-Integral-Derivative Controller On the Distributed Control System for Steam Temperature Control of Thermal Power Plant

In the thermal power plant, there are six manipulated variables: main steam flow, feedwater flow, fuel flow, air flow, spray flow, and gas recirculation flow. There are five controlled variables: generator output, main steam pressure, main steam temperature, exhaust gas density, and reheater steam temperature. Therefore, the thermal power plant control system is a multinput and output system. In the control system, the main steam temperature is typically regulated by the fuel flow rate and the spray flow rate, and the reheater steam temperature is regulated by the gas recirculation flow rate. However, strict control of the steam temperature must be maintained to avoid thermal stress. Maintaining the steam temperature can be difficult due to heating value variation to the fuel source, time delay changes in the main steam temperature versus changes in fuel flow rate, difficulty of control of the main steam temperature control and the reheater steam temperature control system owing to the dynamic response characteristics of changes in steam temperature and the reheater steam temperature, and the fluctuation of inner fluid water and steam flow rates during the load-following operation. Up to the present time, the Proportional-Integral-Derivative Controller has been used to operate this system. However, it is very difficult to achieve an optimal PID gain with no experience, since the gain of the PID controller has to be manually tuned by trial and error. This paper focuses on the characteristic comparison of the PID controller and the modified 2-DOF PID Controller (Two-Degrees-Freedom Proportional-Integral-Derivative) on the DCS (Distributed Control System). The method is to design an optimal controller that can be operated on the thermal generating plant in Seoul, Korea. The modified 2-DOF PID controller is designed to enable parameters to fit into the thermal plant during disturbances. To attain an optimal control method, transfer function and operating data from start-up, running, and stop procedures of the thermal plant have been acquired. Through this research, the stable range of a 2-DOF parameter for only this system could be found for the start-up procedure and this parameter could be used for the tuning problem. Also, this paper addressed whether an intelligent tuning method based on immune network algorithms can be used effectively in tuning these controllers.