Abstract:
This research presents a comparative study on nature inspired optimization technique for Load Frequency Control (LFC) in a reheat thermal system
using Firefly Algorithm (FA) and Cuckoo Search (CS). Load Frequency Control (LFC) is an important control element in the synchronous generator which
is tasked to damp frequency oscillation during load changes. LFC plays a very important role in providing quality power in the case of isolated as well
as interconnected power systems. The objective of this project is to design a single area of reheat thermal system model and to apply the nature inspired
optimization techniques into the system in order to find the optimal solution for the controller used to get the least error by observing the Integral Time
Squared Error (ITSE) of the system. This research covers single area of reheat thermal system which uses a Fractional order controller (FOC) and also uses
two well-known nature inspired optimization techniques. The Fractional order controller (FOC) possess important properties such as, eliminating steady state
error, robustness toward plant gain variations and also good disturbance rejection. Thus, the FOC based PID controller (FOPID) will be beneficial to the power
system as it will ensure good system performance. The fitness function Integral Time of Squared Error is chosen to evaluate the error of an area because it
shows more advantageous performance compared to the other fitness function such as ITAE and IAE. In this study, a comparative analysis is carried out using
the Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm and Firefly Algorithm (FA) technique to tune the FOPID controller of the LFC for a single area interconnected reheat thermal
system. The frequency response and tie line power should be observed in terms of settling time and overshoot/undershoot to evaluate the performance of the tuned
FOPID controller and to give the better performance.
