A Sliding Mode Control Approach for Gas Turbine Power Generators

Gas turbines are raising nowadays growing interest in the power generation industry. Being able to regulate their power production faster than any other form of conventional source, they are extremely valuable in compensating stochastic power fluctuations deriving from renewable energy sources in large-scale electrical grids, preserving grid stability, etc. In this context, gas turbines' dynamic performance plays a key role and it needs to be enhanced (however preserving the machine lifetime at the same time). Nonlinear model based control systems can effectively deal with this problem, exploiting the system structure to obtain optimal dynamic performance. Therefore, this paper aims at developing a sliding mode model based control for gas turbines. The results obtained from its application on a heavy duty Ansaldo gas turbine model (AE94.3A4) are compared to the ones obtained to the traditional control employed in these applications.