Intelligent control algorithm for steam temperature regulation of Thermal Power Plants

Artificial intelligence techniques have been developed through extensive practical implementations in industry in form of intelligent control. One of the most successful expert-system techniques, applied to a wide range of control applications, has been fuzzy logic technique. This paper shows the implementation of a fuzzy logic controller (FLC) to regulate the steam temperature in a 300 MW Thermal Power Plant. The proposed FLC was applied to regulate superheated and reheated steam temperature. The results show that the fuzzy controller has a better performance than advanced model-based controller, such as Dynamic Matrix Control (DMC) or a conventional PID controller. The main benefits are the reduction of the overshoot and the tighter regulation of the steam temperatures. Fuzzy-logic controllers can achieve good result for complex nonlinear processes with dynamic variation or with long delay times.