Maximum Sensitivity-Constrained Data-Driven Active Disturbance Rejection Control with Application to Airflow Control in Power Plant

The increasing energy demand and the changing of energy structure have imposed higher requirements on the conventional large-scale power plants control. Complexity of the power plant processes and the frequent change of operation condition make the accurate physical models hard to obtain for control design. To this end, a data-driven control strategy, the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) has received much attention for the estimation and mitigation of uncertain dynamics beyond the canonical form of cascaded integrators. However, the robustness of ADRC is seldom discussed in a quantitative manner. In this study, the maximum sensitivity is used to evaluate and then constrain the robustness of ADRC applied to high-order processes. Firstly, by using the new idea of the vertical asymptote of the Nyquist curve, a preliminary one-parameter-tuning method is developed. Secondly, a quantitative relationship between the maximum sensitivity and the tuning parameter is established using optimization methods. Then, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method is initially verified in the total air flow control of a power plant simulator. Finally, field tests on the secondary airflow control in a 330 MWe circulating fluidized bed confirm the merit of the proposed maximum sensitivity-constrained ADRC tuning.