AGC of a multi-area thermal-CCGT system using Cuckoo Search optimized classical controllers

This paper presents Automatic Generation Control of a two unequal area Thermal - Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) system. Thermal area is provided with single reheat turbine and generation rate constraints (GRC) of 3% per minute while CCGT system is provided with GRC of 5% per minute. Several classical controllers such as Integral (I), Proportional-Integral (PI) and Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) are considered separately in the system for secondary, air flow and temperature controllers. The gains of the controllers are optimized using Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm. Dynamic responses corresponding to these controllers are compared. Analysis reveals that the performance of PID controllers is much better than the others. Sensitivity analysis reveals the robustness of the optimized PID controller gains of the two area system to wide changes in inertia constant (H), system loading condition and other system parameters.