A novel design of active disturbance rejection controller and its application in the Circulating Fluidized Bed Boiler combustion system

Circulating Fluidized Bed Boiler (CFBB) is a nonlinear system with large time delay and strong coupling. Faced with the existing problems, a novel active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) design method is proposed based on effective open-loop transfer function (EOTF). The interaction effects for a particular loop from all the other loops are incorporated into EOTFs so that the system can be approximated as a diagonal transfer function matrix. By doing so, the individual ADRC controller can be designed independently for each single loop. The rest coupling effects beyond the EOTF and the external disturbances are expected to be mitigated by ADRC. Simulation is applied in a CFBB plant. Compared with the conventional control methods, the results show that the method proposed in this paper possesses strong decoupling ability and robustness and demonstrate the feasibility for the multivariable control design.