Abstract
This article focuses on maximizing the thermal energy collected by parabolic-trough solar collector fields to increase the production of the plant. To this end, we propose a market-based clustering model predictive control strategy in which controllers of collector loops may offer and demand heat transfer fluid in a market. When a transaction is made between loop controllers, a coalition is formed, and the corresponding agents act as a single entity. The proposed hierarchical algorithm fosters the formation of coalitions dynamically to improve the overall control objective, increasing the thermal energy delivered by the field. Finally, the proposed controller is assessed via simulation with other control methods in two solar parabolic-trough fields. The results show that the energy efficiency with the clustering strategy outperforms by 12% that of traditional controllers, and the method is implementable in real-time to control large-scale solar collector fields, where significant gains in thermal collected energy can be obtained, due to its scalability.
Highlights
The increasing trend of energy demand causes a significant impact on the environment
We propose a hierarchical market-based coalitional model predictive control (MPC) to maximize the thermal energy collected by distributed solar parabolic-trough plants
Improvements of thermal energy efficiency by up to 12% by implementing the proposed coalitional MPC strategy in two simulated solar collector fields of 10 and 100 loops modeled after the ACUREX field at the Plataforma Solar de Almería (PSA) [16,12]
Summary
The increasing trend of energy demand causes a significant impact on the environment. Clean, and secure renewable energy sources such as solar, hydropower, wind, biomass, and geothermal are essential to deal with this steep demand. Renewable energy accounted for nearly 28% of global electricity generation in the first quarter of 2020 and is projected to increase to almost 30% in 2021 [1, 2]. The most standard solar technologies are photovoltaic cells (PV), which directly generate electricity from sunlight, and concentrating solar power (CSP), which concentrates sun radiation in a heat transfer fluid (HTF) to produce steam and drive an electricity generator (see Fig. 1). For large-scale power generation, CSP presents further advantages due to storing thermal energy to produce electricity when there is low or no sunlight, e.g., cloudy days and nights
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