Abstract
Steam condensers are vital components of thermal power plants, responsible for converting turbine exhaust steam back into water for reuse in the power generation cycle. Effective pressure regulation is crucial to ensure operational efficiency and equipment safety. However, conventional control strategies, such as PI, PI-PDn and FOPID controllers, often struggle to manage the nonlinearities and disturbances inherent in steam condenser systems. This paper introduces a novel multistage controller, TDn(1 + PIDn), optimized using the diligent crow search algorithm (DCSA). The proposed controller is specifically designed to address system nonlinearities, external disturbances, and the complexities of dynamic responses in steam condensers. Key contributions include the development of a flexible multi-stage control framework and its optimization via DCSA to achieve enhanced stability, faster response times, and reduced steady-state errors. Simulation results demonstrate that the TDn(1 + PIDn) controller outperforms conventional control strategies, including those tuned with advanced metaheuristic algorithms, in terms of settling time, overshoot, and integral of time weighted absolute error (ITAE). This study marks a significant advancement in pressure regulation strategies, providing a robust and adaptive solution for nonlinear industrial systems.