Load-Sharing Strategy Taking Account of Compressor Degradation

The objective of designing a control structure that takes the degradation of the system into account is to preserve its performance and mitigate further damage. This problem is often encountered in process industries, e.g. in gas processing plants, where the question arises how to distribute the control effort among multiple actuators based on their degradation. The main focus of this work is to investigate how to assign the loads in a two-compressor system taking the degradation, i.e. the loss of available performance, into consideration. Contrarily to other approaches, such as methods based on distance to surge or predictive control, the algorithm proposed in this work does not require a reconfiguration of the control structure, at the same time taking explicitly the degradation into account. The simulation results confirm that this approach mitigates further loss of performance, in particular for compressors, which have significantly different degradation rates.