Theses and Dissertations Collection

Maintaining system voltage is a primary concern for power system stability. Within the excitation system, the voltage is maintained at the set point by a compensator known as the Automatic voltage regulator (AVR). One popular compensator design in AVR and other applications is the ProportionalIntegral Derivative (PID). The PID controller is popular in modern control applications due to its simplicity and robustness. In recent years a large body of research has been conducted on the optimization of PID tuning parameters using heuristic techniques. While PID is popular, the low order limits the performance of this design. In this paper, a PID compensator is used to develop a high-order compensator for an AVR system. The performance of the system with the new compensator is shown to be superior to that of the default system. Compensator performance is tested using a high-fidelity model of a nuclear generating station.