Gas Turbine Power Generators, Innovative Sliding Mode Load Controller

This thesis deals with the design of an innovative load controller for heavy-duty gas turbine power generators and with its practical implementation on real industrial power plants. A robust controller based on the Sliding Mode control technique is designed, in order to improve the performance of the gas turbine system with respect to the traditional Proportional-Integral-Derivative based regulation currently employed. As a matter of fact, such regulation encounters many difficulties when the system operates in off-design conditions, which is the most frequent situation, leading to a deterioration of the gas turbine performance. This work is developed in collaboration with Ansaldo Energia S.p.A., which is one of the most important heavy-duty gas turbines manufacturing company in the world. The interaction with the industrial partner represents one of the key points of this thesis since the proposed controller could be implemented on real industrial microprocessors and it was possible to validate its performance in a Real Time Simulation environment in the Ansaldo Energia R&D laboratories. The controller validation, performed in a Hardware-In-the-Loop set-up, showed highly satisfactory results and important improvements in comparison with the traditional regulation of the GT power generator.