Non linear control of a distributed solar field

This paper is concerned with temperature PID control with gain scheduling in a solar power plant. The control solution is driven by the characteristics of the process and the scheduling variable is obtained directly from the accessible disturbances and reference value. The PID parameters are tuned for an intermediate operating point and then extrapolated for all operating range based on the physics of the plant. The known dependency with the flow guarantees that the time constants and incremental gain varies monotonically with the operating point. This results in known monotonous curves for each controller parameter dependency on the scheduling variable. Experimental results at the solar plant are presented.