Load-Sharing Strategy Taking Account of Compressor Degradation

Abstract

The objective of designing a control structure that takes the degradation of the system into account is to preserve its performance and mitigate further damage. This problem is often encountered in process industries, e.g. in gas processing plants, where the question arises how to distribute the control effort among multiple actuators based on their degradation. The main focus of this work is to investigate how to assign the loads in a two-compressor system taking the degradation, i.e. the loss of available performance, into consideration. Contrarily to other approaches, such as methods based on distance to surge or predictive control, the algorithm proposed in this work does not require a reconfiguration of the control structure, at the same time taking explicitly the degradation into account. The simulation results confirm that this approach mitigates further loss of performance, in particular for compressors, which have significantly different degradation rates. *Financial support is gratefully acknowledged from the Marie Curie Horizon 2020 EID-ITN project "PROcess NeTwork Optimization for efficient and sustainable operation of Europe's process industries taking machinery condition and process performance into account PRONTO", Grant agreement No 675215.

Using Prognostics and Health Monitoring Data in Load Distribution Optimization Problems

“…The gas compressor station considered in this example consists of a suction tank and a set of variable speed compressors in parallel. Figure 4 shows a schematic of a gas compressor station with two compressors (Zagorowska et al, 2018). Fig.…”

Minimum Energy Adaptive Load Sharing of Parallel Operated Compressors

“…The presented optimization algorithm was verified on an industrial case study. Publication [17] developed a load sharing strategy based on a degradation indicator that reflects the extent of fouling of compressor blades and the roughening of its surfaces. The proposed load sharing managed to slow down degradation by reducing the need for the degraded compressor while increasing the setpoints for the healthy compressor.…”