Fuzzy Logic Energy Management Strategy of a Multiple Latent Heat Thermal Storage in a Small-Scale Concentrated Solar Power Plant

Tascioni, Roberto; Arteconi, Alessia; Zotto, Luca Del; Cioccolanti, Luca

doi:10.3390/en13112733

Cited by 17 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…In addition, a model predictive control operation strategy was also exploited to minimize the objective composed of tracking the schedule and generating the optimal schedule for the next day. Studies of optimal operation strategy of CSP-TES can also be found in many works [14][15][16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible Operation of Concentrating Solar Power Plant with Thermal Energy Storage Based on a Coordinated Control Strategy

et al. 2022

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With the ambition of achieving carbon neutrality worldwide, renewable energy is flourishing. However, due to the inherent uncertainties and intermittence, operation flexibility of controllable systems is critical to accommodate renewables. Existing studies mainly focus on improving the flexibility of conventional plants, while no attention has been paid to the flexible operation of concentrating solar power with thermal energy storage (CSP-TES) systems. To this end, the ultimate goal of this work is to investigate the potentiality and realization of CSP-TES systems to flexibly operate in grid system regulation. With this goal, the dynamic characteristics of a 50 MW parabolic trough collector CSP plant with molten-salt-based TES is analyzed, and its dominant control characteristics are concluded to demonstrate the possibility of the ideal. After that, a coordinated control strategy is proposed. Specifically, a disturbance observer-based feedforward–feedback control scheme and a feedforward–feedback controller are designed, respectively, for the solar field and the energy storage subsystems, while the power block subsystem is regulated by a two-input and two-output decoupled controller. Based on the decentralized structure, three simulation cases are, respectively, performed to testify the capacity of the CSP-TES system to wide-range load variation tracking, strong disturbance rejection, or both. The results show that the CSP-TES system can adequately track the grid commands based on the proposed coordinated control strategy, even under strong fluctuation of irradiation, demonstrating the flexibility of CSP-TES participating in grid regulation. In the context of continuous penetration of renewable energy into the grid system, research on the role transition of the CSP-TES system from its own optimization to grid regulator is of great importance.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible Operation of Concentrating Solar Power Plant with Thermal Energy Storage Based on a Coordinated Control Strategy

et al. 2022

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“…For these reasons, the design of Steam Turbines (STs) nowadays must take into account frequent discontinuous operations. For instance, in the case of Concentrated Solar Power Plants (CSPP), the inlet steam highly depends on the weather conditions [4], while in industrial power generation, the discontinuity is related to the scheduling of the electricity production, optimized according to the prices of energy media (natural gas and electricity) that vary on an hourly or daily basis. One of the most important aspects related to discontinuous operation is the need to enforce protection against stress induced by thermal transients, which, due to the continuous changes in the steam conditions, can lead to faster aging of the turbine and, in extreme cases, to component failure due to nucleation and propagation of cracks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Steam Turbine Rotor Stress Control through Nonlinear Model Predictive Control

et al. 2021

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The current flexibility of the energy market requires operating steam turbines that have challenging operation requirements such as variable steam conditions and higher number of startups. This article proposes an advanced control system based on the Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) technique, which allows to speed up the start-up of steam turbines and increase the energy produced while maintaining rotor stress as a constraint variable. A soft sensor for the online calculation of rotor stress is presented together with the steam turbine control logic. Then, we present how the computational cost of the controller was contained by reducing the order of the formulation of the optimization problem, adjusting the scheduling of the optimizer routine, and tuning the parameters of the controller itself. The performance of the control system has been compared with respect to the PI Controller architecture fed by the soft sensor results and with standard pre-calculated curves. The control architecture was evaluated in a simulation exploiting actual data from a Concentrated Solar Power Plant. The NMPC technique shows an increase in performance, with respect to the custom PI control application, and encouraging results.

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“…In particular, as highlighted also by other authors [6], the thermal inertia of concentrated solar power plants plays a major role in their transient behaviour. An example of the influence of the thermal inertia in such systems is provided also in [7], where the combination of the activated thermal mass of the storage included in the plant and the smart control logic shows a relevant impact on the overall system performance. Hence, in order to properly design and optimize the control system and its logic, the dynamics of the plant need to be carefully investigated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prediction of the time constant of small-scale concentrated solar CHP plants

et al. 2021

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The operation of a power plant based on solar energy can vary significantly with time because of the intrinsic intermittency of the energy resource. Hence, a smart management is required to deal with the complex dynamic variations of the different subsystems. In order to do that, different control logics can be implemented but their effectiveness strictly depends on the temporal evolution of the parameters considered. For a given plant configuration, their exact estimation can be obtained through experimental tests during the commissioning of the plant. However, any change in the design parameters of the plant reflects in a different time constant, whose preliminary knowledge may be of support in tuning the control logic of the plant during the design stage. Therefore, based on the configuration of a small-scale concentrated solar combined heat and power plant as designed and built under the EU funded project Innova MicroSolar by several universities and companies, in this study a prediction of the time constant of several plant configurations with varying solar multiple and size of the storage tank is performed. By making use of the dynamic simulator previously developed by some of the authors, an estimation of such characteristic is assessed in case of potential redesign of the plant, providing also useful suggestions into the design of the control logic.

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Fuzzy Logic Energy Management Strategy of a Multiple Latent Heat Thermal Storage in a Small-Scale Concentrated Solar Power Plant

Cited by 17 publications

References 26 publications

Flexible Operation of Concentrating Solar Power Plant with Thermal Energy Storage Based on a Coordinated Control Strategy

Flexible Operation of Concentrating Solar Power Plant with Thermal Energy Storage Based on a Coordinated Control Strategy

Steam Turbine Rotor Stress Control through Nonlinear Model Predictive Control

Prediction of the time constant of small-scale concentrated solar CHP plants

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