Nonlinear control of a gas turbine using backstepping

This paper presents a nonlinear backstepping controller derived for control of a gas turbine. Specifically, it enables a gas turbine to provide mechanical power equal to the load, while controlling the frequency to a desired value. The resulting controller is then compared to a standard droop controller, where the new control solution shows improved performance in terms of smaller overshoot during load change and shorter convergence time. Through simulations it is shown that during a load change of 4 MW, the overshoot is reduced by 71.77% and the settling time is reduced by 17.48% when using the proposed backstepping controller compared to using a standard droop controller. Additionally, an unscented Kalman filter is applied for state estimation that is used in conjunction with the proposed backstepping controller, where the overall solution shows promising results.