In the last few decades, an increasing interest
has been given to renewable energy with
the objective of reducing reliability on fossil energy. Particularly,
characterized by the high productivity at industrial scale, thermal solar power
production attracted many researchers to optimize solar collectors’ production.
Concentrated solar collectors have been widely
used to convert the solar sunlight to heat. The objective considered in parabolic trough
systems is the control of the outlet oil temperature that has to evolve around
a reference level. The goal is to design a control law to tune the oil flow in
order to make the outlet temperature tracking a set point despite the presence
of possible environmental disturbances. Mainly, the most critical disturbances
are the changes in solar radiation due to weather fluctuations, and the
variations in the inlet oil coming from the bottom of the storage tank.
Moreover, the defined control problem is not easy to analyze because of the
model complexity. Indeed, the physical distributed model describing the solar
collector field is nonlinear and of infinite dimension (partial differential
equation PDE)
Objectives:
- Study
the distributed solar model.
- Propose
an appropriate approximation model based on reduced models approach.
- Design
an efficient control strategy for the reduced model which allows
for the optimization of the heat energy production
- Validate
the results through an experimental setup which we are desiging.
- Combine
the solar collector and the membrane distillation plant and study the
performance of the overall control system