Load frequency control of a m ulti‐source multi‐area thermal system including biogas–solar thermal along with pumped hydro energy storage system using MBA ‐optimized 3DOF‐TIDN controller

Abstract

In this article, load frequency control has been studied in an unequal three-area system under a deregulated environment. The area 1 comprises thermal and biodiesel units, area 2 has thermal and solar thermal power plant (STPP), and area 3 has thermal with biogas, wind turbine system (WTS) along with pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) units. A new secondary controller called three degree-of-freedom tilt-integral-derivative with filter (3DOF-TIDN) controller has been proposed, and its performance is compared with integral, tilt-integral-derivative with filter, and two degree-of-freedom-TIDN controllers. The investigation reveals 3DOF-TIDN controller provides better dynamic performance in terms of settling time, peak deviation, and magnitude of oscillations in both generating and motoring mode of PHES. The stability analysis has been performed for the proposed system using different secondary controller. The controller parameters are optimized using novel optimization technique called Mine Blasting Algorithm. In this study, real-time OPAL-RT digital simulator has been used to effectually execute the considered power system under various scenarios, and the obtained results are compared with MATLAB/Simulink results. Further, a comparative study of dynamic responses of the system has been carried out considering different mechanical energy storage devices like PHES, flywheel energy storage device, and compressed air energy storage, and the analysis shows that PHES gives superior performances than others. Robustness analysis of proposed controller gains is also conducted, considering different uncertainties.