Operation diagnosis of a combined cycle based on the structural theory of thermoeconomics

Abstract:

Diagnosis of the performance of energy was theoretically developed based on the Structural Theory (Valero, Serra and Lozano, 1993), and traditionally Thermoeconomics have usually been applied to the design of power plants and comparison between alternatives. However, the application of thermoeconomic techniques to actual power plants has always to face the generally poor quality of measurement readings from the standard field instrumentation as an unavoidable first step. The proposed methodology focuses on measurement uncertainty estimation and performance calculation by means of data reconciliation techniques, in order to obtain the most confident plant balance upon the available instrumentation. The formulation of the Structural Theory has been applied to a combined cycle, where the Fuel-Product relationships at the component level must be optimally defined for a correct malfunction interpretation. This set of relationships determines the ability to diagnose and the level of the diagnostics obtained. The paper reports the application of the methodology to a 280 MW rated combined cycle, where performance diagnosis is illustrated with results from a collection of actual operation data sets. The results show that data reconciliation yields sufficient accuracy to conduct a thermoeconomic analysis, and how the estimated impact on fuel correlates with physical causes. Hence the feasibility of thermoeconomic analysis of plant operation is demonstrated.

Año de publicación:

1999

Keywords:

Fuente:

scopus