Aspects of the choice of sampling frequency in the control system of a gas turbine

Abstract: At Siemens, plcs are used to control the gas turbines, and to execute the code in the plcs cyclic interrupts are used. If the execution time for the interrupt becomes close to the cyclic time of the interrupt the load of the plc increases. High load levels can lead to situations were segments of code are not executed on time or even not executed at all. In this thesis an analysis of the regulators used to govern a gas turbine has been performed. The purpose of the analysis is to study the performance of the regulators for different cycle times with the aim to be able to reduce the load by sampling more slowly. To determine the load contribution from each regulator a review of the regulators and their execution times has been made. For the analysis the Matlab program Simulink has been used to make models of the regulators, which have then been sampled at different rates. With this information it is possible to determine for which cycle times each regulator has accepetable performance and how much load each regulator contributes with. A save of load of approximately 2 percent can be obtained without loosing too much performance.