Event-Based PI Plus Feedforward Control Strategies for a Distributed Solar Collector Field

This brief deals with the application of an event-based proportional-integral (PI) plus feedforward control strategy to a distributed solar collector field. In particular, a symmetric send-on-delta strategy is considered and an event based feedforward action to compensate for the disturbance represented by changes in the solar radiation is added to the PI control law. Furthermore, we propose a simple strategy, based on the describing function technique, to estimate the model parameters for tuning the controller. The obtained experimental results show that the proposed control strategy permits to obtain a very significant reduction of the events with only a slight decrement of the control performance.