Power plant boilers drum water level control using a new adaptive control algorithm by considering the control loop performance and increasing life cycle of its control valve (case study: Qom combined cycle power plant boiler IP drum water level control)

Drum water level control loop is one of the most important control loops in any steam power plant. In case of unacceptable performance of this loop, we have reduction of power plant efficiency, failure of equipment or maybe power plant shut down. Since in this loop, we use the feed water control valve as final control element, is very important to have minimum swing as possible in order to increase of the life cycle control valve. In this paper, to achieve this objective, a new adaptive control algorithm is proposed which have good life cycle control valve, to reduce the disturbance effect due to steam demand variation, to consider drum thermodynamic nonlinear characteristics and to robust to dynamical parameters variation. In order to evaluate the performance of proposed algorithm in real industrial situation, this algorithm is applied to Qom combined cycle power plant boiler No 11 drum water level dynamical model. The simulation results using this algorithm and power plant classical controller, sliding mode control, Auto-tune fraction order PID show the proposed algorithm regarding the life cycle of feed water control valve and control loop performance in different conditions has better performance compared to these algorithms.