Design of a Nonlinear Predictive Controller for a Fractional-Order Hydraulic Turbine Governing System with Mechanical Time Delay

A nonlinear predictive control method for a fractional-order hydraulic turbine governing system (HTGS) with a time delay is studied in this paper. First, a fractional-order model of a time-delay hydraulic turbine governing system is presented. Second, the fractional-order hydraulic servo subsystem is transformed into a standard controlled autoregressive moving average (CARMA) model according to the Grunwald-Letnikov (G-L) definition of fractional calculus. Third, based on the delayed Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model, the fuzzy prediction model of the integer-order part of the HTGS is given. Then, by introducing a fourth-order Runge-Kutta algorithm, the fuzzy prediction model can be easily transformed into the CARMA model. Furthermore, a nonlinear predictive controller is proposed to stabilize the time-delay HTGS. Finally, the experiment results are consistent with the theoretical analysis.