Fuzzy supervisor and feedforward control of a solar power plant using accessible disturbances

A fuzzy switching supervisor PID control approach is developed and applied to a distributed collector field of a solar power plant. To deal with the effects of fast and unexpected deviations on the solar radiation and on the inlet oil temperature the introduction of a feedforward compensator is also investigated. Simulation and experimental results, obtained at the Plataforma Solar de Almería (Spain), are presented showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.