Temperature control of a solar furnace

An application of an automatic control strategy to a solar plant for material treatment has been shown. Since these kinds of plants are manually operated by skilled operators, the development of an automatic control strategy aimed at achieving adequate results throughout the wide range of operating conditions, under which these plants operate, represents an important improvement towards facilitating operation and obtaining desired performance. The control scheme presented is based on a PI controller which incorporates feedforward compensation, an anti-windup mechanism and actuator slew rate constraint handling, both in fixed and self-tuning configurations. It has been developed and applied to the control of a solar furnace for samples of different materials under extreme temperature profiles. Different plant results have been shown and both advantages and drawbacks of the scheme have been commented on