Digital Optimal Reduced-order Control of a Solar Power Plant

So far, researchers have developed simplified models to control the so called Acurex field, which is a solar power plant situated in Tabernas in Spain, used mainly for research purposes. Most of these simplified models for control have been used in simulation. Some have also been used in control experiments. Usually an advanced model of the plant was used to identify and verify the simplified model. This advanced model is a finite dimensional approximation of the physical description of the plant by two partial differential equations. In this paper we use the advanced model itself to control the plant. Despite the high dimension of the model our digital optimal reduced-order controller design procedure enables us to synthesize a digital optimal reduced-order controller with just one state variable. This controller is shown to work properly in simulation and also in a control experiment.