Event-Based PI Plus Feedforward Control Strategies for a Distributed Solar Collector Field

This brief deals with the application of an event-based proportional-integral (PI) plus feedforward control strategy to a distributed solar collector field. In particular, a symmetric send-on-delta strategy is considered and an event-based feedforward action to compensate for the disturbance represented by changes in the solar radiation is added to the PI control law. Furthermore, we propose a simple strategy, based on the describing function technique, to estimate the model parameters for tuning the controller. The obtained experimental results show that the proposed control strategy permits to obtain a very significant reduction of the events with only a slight decrement of the control performance.