Model Predictive Control With Disturbance Observer for Marine Diesel Engine Speed Control

Abstract

The application of model predictive control (MPC) algorithm in the fixed phase control of marine diesel engine speed is studied under the premise of considering model mismatch and external disturbance. Firstly, the steady-state error problem of conventional MPC controller is solved by changing nonlinear model to incremental form. Furthermore, discrete disturbance observer (DO) is introduced in the feedback correction, which can filter out the high-frequency disturbance and reduce the requirement of algorithm on the accuracy of model. Then, considering that nonlinear MPC based on DO (DONMPC) requires a large amount of online computation, the algorithm is simplified by preliminarily converting the nonlinear model to linear model. Through analysis, the controller performance of the two models is similar. Furthermore, considering that the speed of marine diesel engine is usually set to a few fixed reference values, a linear multi-model predictive controller based on DO (DOLMMPC) with less online calculation is proposed. Finally, the designed controllers are verified by experiments. The software simulations of the designed controllers and the PID controller are carried out on the cylinder-by-cylinder mean value engine model (MVEM). It is proved that the algorithm simplification method retains the control performance of the DONMPC algorithm, and the control performance of the designed two controllers is better than the PID controller. Moreover, the DOLMMPC controller and PID controller are tested on the semi-physical simulation platform. The results demonstrate that the DOLMMPC controller can meet the computational power limit of the microprocessor in practical engineering.

Keywords

• Disturbance observer
• marine diesel engine
• model predictive control
• mean value engine model
• speed control