Decentralized active disturbance rejection control for a benchmark boiler

The boiling process is a multivariable nonlinear system with strong interactions and input constraints. In this paper, a decentralized linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) method is investigated for a benchmark boiler control problem, where the boiler model is proposed in an IFAC Conference and can be used as a benchmark for various control methods. To overcome the saturation and slew-rate constraint of the control inputs, an anti-windup scheme is proposed for LADRC, where the error between the controller output and the actuator output is fed back to the extended state observer (ESO) for estimation and elimination. Simulation results show that the proposed method is simple to apply in practice and can achieve good performance.