Course Details

Introduction

Ref No:      EE089
Title:          Automatic Voltage Regulator(VAR)
Start Date: 04 April 2021  End Date: 08 April 2021  
Venue:       Dubai, UAE
Fee:          $4,500

In any of the 5 star hotels. The exact venue will be informed once finalized.

When the first power systems were introduced more than a hundred years ago the controls used were very primitive and undeveloped. These systems were usually rather small, and the requirements regarding quality and stability were not as high as they are today, so the control could be performed manually in most cases. Fairly soon the end users started to put higher demands on the quality of supply, that is, on the voltage profile and the frequency, so optimized automatic controllers and regulators had to be introduced to meet these requirements.

One of the main power control systems is the Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) system. The role of an AVR is to force the generator terminal voltage to be at a specified level via the excitation system, and is to control the reactive power flow. However, the stability would seriously influence the security of the power system. Hence the designed controller of the AVR system should be robust to load change.

Design of optimal controllers is a crucial point and obviously a fundamental aspect in optimization of system global performances. Tuning of a proportional integral derivative (PID) controller is investigated. Indeed, it is well known that such controllers are the most used controllers in industry. This is mainly due to two major advantages:

• From a theoretical point of view, the structure of this controller naturally allows us to take into account the usual trade-offs in the design of a control law: the proportional action tunes the bandwidth and the rapidity of the system, the integral action allows choosing the level of precision and the steady-state behavior, and the derivative action enhances the stability and robustness of the closed loop.
• From a practical point of view, the tuning of the parameters is facilitated by their strong and intuitive links with the closed-loop behavior. Due to the uncertainties and nonlinearities of some industrial plants, the tuning of PID parameters becomes difficult. Several heuristic tuning methods have been considered, among which the classical Ziegler and Nichols methods. Ziegler-Nichols is mainly proposed to design a controller when no specifications are given, but its optimization to get a good behavior is generally not done.

In this program, we propose to implement a metaheuristic particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, first introduced by Kennedy and Eberhart, in order to evaluate the PSO-PID performance criteria in time and frequency domain applied to the AVR system. Compared to this traditional approach, the use of this design method allows optimization and tuning of controllers. Indeed, initial specifications expressed, for instance, in terms of time responses, maximum overshoot or control energy corresponding to functions that can only be computed using simulation. Thus, PSO which only requires the possibility of evaluating cost and constraint functions appears as a good candidate method.

From an optimization point of view, some attempts to optimize these difficult cost functions have been performed, but the proposed method remains a local search method and so is strongly dependent on the initial point. Metaheuristic PSO methods, with the different topologies, will also be tested to solve the controller tuning and optimization problem.

Audience

This program is excellent for training technicians, operators and engineers as well as for the multi-craft training needs of process and manufacturing facilities.

Certificate

DEFINE Management Consultancy & Training Certificate of course completion will be issued to all attendees.

Fees

4,500 US$ per participant includes Training Materials/Handouts, Tea/Coffee breaks, Refreshments and International Buffet Lunch.