Abstract
The purpose of ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) is to extract power from temperature differences existing in the oceans. The OTEC system design mainly comprises an OTEC plant design and an OTEC control design. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of a computer simulator for the OTEC system design. The computer simulator, constructed by a computer with A/D and D/A converters, produces analogue input and output signals which are equivalent to those of an actual OTEC plant. By using the computer simulator of an OTEC plant, we can estimate properties of any OTEC plant easily, economically and safely. The computer simulator also plays an important role in detecting difficulties in designing the OTEC controller. We furthermore described the procedure for designing the OTEC controller as follows: (i) statement of the control objective, (ii) modeling of the controlled object, (iii) application of control theory to the model, (iv) characterization of the detector and the input signal part, and (v) construction of the controller. We constructed the computer simulator and the controller for pump flow rate as part of the OTEC plant. We then obtained satisfactory control performance for flow rate control of experiments.
