Simulation and control of solar thermal power plants

In this paper, first the overall modeling approach for an optimized control of a hot-gas cycle for solar thermal power plants in the Modelica language is pointed out. The emphasis of the modeling work lies on the development of dynamic component models to be used in control systems. Depending on the control task, the discretization of the models has to be adapted. Main components of the hot-gas cycle are the solar thermal receiver and the storage system. The steam cycle is preliminarily only included as heat sink. Second, for control purposes a linear model-based controller (MPC) was implemented in Modelica based on an external state-of-the-art QP solver linked to the Modelica model. The performance of the MPC is compared with a basic automation scheme based on classical PID controllers