Intelligent control of a boiler-turbine plant based on switching control scheme

This paper reports on our present achievement toward the intelligent control of a boiler-turbine power-plant based on switching control scheme, recently revived by some active reports. To overcome strong nonlinearity emerging in load following operations of boiler-turbine power plants, which is not efficiently compensated by the conventional PI-based gain scheduling control, a neural-based nonlinear feedforward switching control scheme is employed. Owing to its 2-degree freedom type instalment in the control system and proper switching of nonlinear feedforward control by monitoring contribution of inverse dynamics error to control error, effective suppression of nonlinearity is achieved.