Control of High-pressure Steam Condenser via Reference Governor

Abstract

We consider a high-pressure steam condenser, which is a constrained system with various saturation characteristics and physical constraints on the input and output signals. If these constraints are not properly accounted for, then a rapid change of disturbance may lead to constraint violations and, as a result, cause control performance deterioration or mess up stable operations of the system. It is thus desired to avoid the constraint violations due to such a change of disturbance. This paper presents a method for reducing the risk of the constraint violations by using an additional mechanism called a reference governor, which modifies a reference signal and inputs the resulting signal to the closed-loop system designed a priori. Simulation and experimental results show that the present simple reference governor algorithm is quite effective in control of the high-pressure steam condenser.