A k-step predictive scheme for speed control of diesel driven power plants

An adaptive speed control scheme for diesel prime movers is presented. Diesel prime movers are characterized by nonlinear, time-varying parameters including a nonlinear input dead-time variation that introduces an unknown delay between the injection of fuel and the production of engine torque. Such plants are difficult to control by conventional proportional-integral (PI) controllers. It is shown that by assuming the existence of an additional system time constant, an explicit estimate of the plant parameters and dead-time may be obtained. The algorithm converges rapidly. The resulting predictor can be used to set up a k-step ahead predictive controller. Studies that compare the performance of the adaptive scheme to that of a fixed, tuned, PI controller are presented. The algorithm is shown to be flexible enough to operate under a wide range of droop settings and is equally applicable to various operating conditions