Robust Control System Design for an Industrial Heavy Duty Gas Turbine under Network-Induced Imperfections

Advent of new communication technologies made it possible to replace point-to-point control structures with networked systems as a breakthrough toward Industry 4.0. However, overcoming communication imperfections is still a major issue. In this paper, a group of network-based cascade control systems is investigated in which, network communication is considered within the controller-actuator channel. In order to reduce conservatism and increase robustness of the control system, time-varying delay and packet dropouts are considered as separate terms using an augmented continuous-time state-space model. Based on Lyapunov theorem, the H-infinity stability conditions are attained dealing with external disturbances. An identified linear model for an industrial gas turbine unit is employed for performance assessment of the designed controllers. Obtained results confirm capability of the proposed method to achieve larger gain margins and more robustness against uncertain delays and data loss.