Fossil-Fuel Power Plant Control

Fossil-fuel power plants, which produce most of the electricity worldwide, currently face more and tighter operation requirements (e.g., life extension, pollution regulation, cyclic operation, heat rate improvement, etc.) than ever before. In these circumstances, an overall approach for their optimal operation and control is of vital technical, economical and ecological relevance. This book contributes a methodology to design a generalized overall control system for a fossil-fuel power unit (FFPU), and develops a minimum prototype to demonstrate its feasibility. An FFPU is envisioned as a complex process, subject to multiple changing operating conditions, which should perform as a large-scale intelligent system. The proposed intelligent hybrid control approach provides an open reference framework, where either algorithmic or heuristic techniques can be used, while keeping complexity manageable, to achieve autonomous and coherent power plant behavior. The proposed methodology may be useful to specialists in the areas of power-plant controls and computational intelligence to systematically design and built control systems for a new generation of intelligent power plants.