Abstract
This paper deals with the proposition of improvement in the performance of a heat source by modification of its structure and by deriving a dedicated control system. Traditional heat sources consist of a single heater of high nominal power, but slow dynamics, that is regulated by a single closed loop control system. In this paper, an existing heater serially-connected with a supplemental heater with low nominal power but fast dynamics is proposed. A dedicated control system was derived with two active disturbance rejection controllers (ADRC) implemented in the habituating control structure. The proposed solution was validated using a virtual commissioning procedure where the heating system was simulated in the SIEMENS® Simit v10.3 industrial software, and ADRC controllers were implemented in SIEMENS® PLCSIM Advanced using dedicated library function blocks. The results showed the superiority of the proposed approach in comparison with the traditional single closed loop solution. The proposed dedicated habituating control system provided better robustness to the changes in dynamics of a heat source and to the measurement noise. At the same time, it will ensure lower (or in some cases comparable) values of popular closed loop performance indices.