Drum water level control of heat recovery boiler via modified active disturbance rejection control

This paper focuses on the drum water level control of a heat recovery boiler, where drum water level is influenced by many factors such as steam flow and feed water flow. To enhance the control performance of drum water level system, a modified active disturbance rejection control (MADRC) is proposed for the integral system, where the inertial link is compensated by adding a compensation part for the control signal. Then the cascade control structure based on MADRC is applied to the drum water level system. Compared to other comparative controllers, simulation results show that MADRC obtains obvious advantages in terms of tracking performance, disturbance rejection ability, and measure noise rejection ability, with satisfactory robustness.