Active disturbance rejection control for power plant with a single loop

Abstract The cascade proportional‐integral‐derivative (PID) control method is widely used in power plant control field. In this paper, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) for a power plant with a single loop is introduced for eliminating the shortcomings of the cascade PID control method. The proposed controller based on the ADRC method consists of a tracking differentiator (TD), an extended state observer (ESO) and a nonlinear combination of errors. In this approach, the processes with higher orders, uncertainties and unmodeled dynamics are viewed as lower‐ordered systems with general disturbances, and the general disturbances are estimated by ESO, and then actively compensated. Besides, only one measured output is needed in the proposed method instead of two or three in the cascade PID control method. Some simulation studies compared with the regular cascade PID control method show the proposed method has better performance beyond the regular cascade PID control method. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society