Predictive temperature control of solar collectors in a desalination plant

This paper presents the application of nonlinear predictive control to the distributed collector field of a solar desalination plant. The main purpose of the controller is to manipulate the water flow rate to maintain an outlet-inlet temperature gradient in the collectors in spite of disturbances and water flow rate constraints. The controller uses a deadtime compensation structure to account for the time delay and a nonlinear MPC to compute the control law. Simulation results using real disturbances data are used to illustrate the controller performance.