Process-Model-Free Design of MPC via a Reference-Model-Based PI Controller for the Gas Turbine

Model predictive control (MPC) is a modern advanced control strategy which has great reputation because of its excellent reference tracking performance and the ability to deal with process constraints, time delay and multivariable problems. However, the gas turbine is difficult to model accurately and unmeasurable disturbances are unavoidable, which limits the application of MPC to the gas turbine. To solve these problems, a process-model-free design method for MPC via a reference-model (RM)-based proportional-integral (PI) controller – desired dynamic equational (DDE)-PI controller (MPC-DDE) is proposed in this paper. The DDE-PI provides the design model for the MPC and handle with unmeasurable disturbances while MPC provides a rolling optimized set point for DDE-PI. Simulation results illustrate the superiorities of the proposed hierarchical control strategy in reference tracking, disturbance rejection and robustness, which indicates the promising prospect of practical application of MPC-DDE to the gas turbine.