Enhancing the Condensate Throttling Stability by Phase Lead Error-Based Active Disturbance Rejection Control Under Full Operating Conditions

Storage utilization can improve the frequency regulation of thermal power units. Condensate throttling is one of the most popular means, and the water level fluctuation brought by its process affects the unit operation safety. In this regard, a phase lead error-based active disturbance rejection control (PL-EADRC) that enhances the disturbance observation capability of conventional ADRC is designed. The condensate throttling with the PL-EADRC achieves a smooth change of load and suppresses the fluctuation of deaerator and condenser water levels. It shows that the proposed strategy has good disturbance rejection capability and robustness under full operating conditions. In addition, its simplicity of structure and ease of tuning mean that it has strong industrial utility. Note to Practitioners—In this paper, an industrial practical control strategy is proposed to stabilize the process parameters of thermal power units under rapid load change. The improvement does not depend on increasing the complexity of control structure and iterative operation, and each parameter has clear physical meaning, which is easy to be adjusted by engineers. The signals used are all measured from the original, without adding new measuring points, which is conducive to flexible transformation.