An Investigation into the Application of Fuzzy Logic Control to Industrial Gas Turbines

This paper investigates the feasibility benefits of applying fuzzy logic control (FLC) strategies for use with industrial gas turbines. Our main objective is to investigate different designs methods, design implement an FLC strategy, plant simulation in a test environment optimize the FLC, conduct tests to compare the FLC with conventional controls in scenarios relevant to the application. We have designed, implemented, and tested our simulation to the exhaust temperature control problem of a gas turbine problem. The FLC, plant simulation, existing control configuration, and integrated test environment were developed in Java. Heuristic methods were used to optimize the FLC, which proved time consuming. The paper illustrates that while implementation of the FLC is feasible, it requires more effort than the conventional controls examined.