Fuzzy Supervisory Tracking Control for a Solar-Tower CSP Plant with an Equivalent-Area Pentagonal Heliostat Field: A Case Study of Al Hudaydah, Yemen
Heliostat tracking deviation is one of the optical factors that becomes more visible when the performance of a solar-tower CSP plant is examined over a full year. In this paper, a 100 MW molten-salt solar-tower plant with 8 hours of thermal storage in Al Hudaydah, Yemen, was studied. A baseline annual run was generated in SAM, and the 8760 hourly outputs were then used in MATLAB to compare conventional tracking with PID and Mamdani fuzzy supervisory tracking. The angular-error model was not taken from field measurements; it was introduced as a common simulation disturbance so that the three cases could be compared under the same plant data. The PID and fuzzy supervisors were given the same correction limit, and electricity produced from stored heat was kept in the annual output. Since SAM does not directly resolve the pentagonal mirror shape, the field was treated through equivalent area and optical parameters. According to the fuzzy supervisor, the annual results showed that, in the higher energy output, the generation increased from 384.91 GWh to 389.95 GWh. Reaching 388.05 GWh, PID controller main advantage appeared in the tracking-error response as the variation decreased. Accordingly, fuzzy supervision is suitable for annual generation while PID is better for tracking stability.
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