Model Predictive Control and Service Life Monitoring for Molten Salt Solar Power Towers

Abstract

A two-component system for control and monitoring of solar power towers with molten salt receivers is proposed. The control component consists of a model predictive control application (MPC) with a flexible objective function and on-line tunable weights, which runs on a Industrial PC and uses a reduced order dynamic model of the receiver’s thermal and flow dynamics. The second component consists of a service-life monitoring unit, which estimates the service-life consumption of the absorber tubes depending on the current mode of operation based on thermal stresses and creep fatigue in the high temperature regime. The calculation of stresses is done based on a detailed finite element study, in which a digital twin of the receiver was developed. By parallelising the model solver, the estimation of service-life consumption became capable of real-time operation. The system has been implemented at a test facility in Jülich, Germany, and awaits field experiments. In this paper, the modeling and architecture are presented along simulation results, which were validated on a hardware-in-the-loop test bench. The MPC showed good disturbance rejection while respecting process variable constraints during the simulation studies.