Fuzzy Approximate Model for Distributed Thermal Solar Collectors Control

This paper deals with the problem of controlling concentrated solar collectors where the objective consists of making the outlet temperature of the collector tracking a desired reference. The performance of the novel approximate model based on fuzzy theory, which has been introduced by the authors in [1], is evaluated comparing to other methods in the literature. The proposed approximation is a low order state representation derived from the physical distributed model. It reproduces the temperature transfer dynamics through the collectors accurately and allows the simplification of the control design. Simulation results show interesting performance of the proposed controller.