Gas Turbine Control and Load Sharing for Shipboard Power Systems

The objective of this research is to design an energy management strategy for an Electric Shipboard Power System. The prime mover is a gas turbine for which a Proportional Integral Derivative speed controller is designed using Particle Swarm Optimization technique. The load on the system has three components: a propulsion load, a power supply load comprising the dc zonal loads and a pulse load to simulate a high energy weapons system. Based on the priorities of the loads and the available power, a strategy is presented to share the power among the load components. As the electric shipboard power system has fixed or limited generating units, load shedding is inevitable when demand exceeds the generation capacity. To illustrate this, a generic load allocation algorithm is developed. The potential of this algorithm is demonstrated by two case studies performed using the three loads of the ESPS supplied by a 59 kW gas turbine and generator. The results of this research are promising and can be extended to real time applications.