Modified Fractional Order PID Controller for Load Frequency Control of Four Area Thermal Power System

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a modified Fractional Order Proportional Integral Derivative (FOPID) controller to mitigate frequency deviation in a four-area thermal power system. Change in load demand and noisy power system environment can cause frequency deviation. Reducing high-frequency deviation is very paramount in load frequency control. This is because large frequency deviation can cause the transmission line to be overloaded, which may damage transformers at the transmission level, damage mechanical devices at the generating stations and also damage consumer devices at the distribution level. The conventional PID has been widely used for this problem. However, the parameter values of the various generating units of the power system like generators, turbines and governors keep changing due to numerous on/off witching in the load side. As such, it is essential that the control strategy applied should have a good capability of handling uncertainties in the system parameters and good disturbance rejection. Fractional order PID controller is known to give a higher phase margin resulting in very good disturbance rejection, robustness to high-frequency noise and elimination of steady-state error. A four-area power system was designed, and FOPID was used as the supplementary controller to mitigate frequency deviation. Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO) algorithm was used to optimize the gains of the FOPID controller by minimizing Integral Square Error (ISE) as the objective function. Results obtained outperformed other designed methods available in the literature in terms of reducing frequency deviation, tie-line power deviation and area control error.