Full state feedback control of steam temperature in a once-through direct steam generation receiver powered by a paraboloidal dish

Once-through direct steam generation (DSG) plants convert water into superheated steam suitable for a steam turbine with a single pass of the fluid through the receiver. The control problem in such a plant is to set a feed-water mass flow that maintains a desired steam condition (e.g., temperature) while rejecting the disturbance effect of variable direct normal irradiance (DNI). A mass flow control strategy preserves the simplicity of the plant, but is challenging to implement from a control perspective, as the disturbance effect is nonlinear and difficult to measure, due to the complex physical nature of two-phase flow and the receiver geometry. A model of the receiver behavior can be incorporated into the controller design in the form of a state observer, to estimate the internal behavior of the receiver during operation. This paper presents the design, testing an experimental implementation of full state linear feedback controller for the steam temperature for a once-through DSG system. The system consists of a 500 m² paraboloidal dish concentrator and a monotube cavity receiver at the Australian National University. The controller manipulates the feed-water mass flow at the receiver inlet to maintain a predetermined specific enthalpy at the receiver outlet, compensating for variations in DNI and other ambient conditions. The controller features three separate regulation mechanisms: a feedforward (FF) law to anticipate changes in DNI; a full state feedback (FSF) loop with a state observer for the receiver; and an additional integrator loop for robustness. Experiments on the Australian National University (ANU) system show that the linear controller maintains steam temperatures to within 3% of a set reference of 500 °C during clear sky conditions, subject to adequate controller tuning. These results show that it is possible to control the ANU system with an FSF loop and state estimator, opening the possibility to test more advanced state based controllers.