Utilization of Models for Online Estimation in Combustion Applications

Timo Korpela

    Research output: Book/ReportDoctoral thesisCollection of Articles

    848 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    The emerging environmental and energy system related requirements urge renewed combustion systems, with a focus on extended flexibility and decreased emissions. At the same time, monitoring and measurement reliability requirements are increasing. All these requirements also increasingly affect existing combustion plants.

    To tackle the increasing needs and requirements of existing combustion processes, this thesis’ objective is to integrate process and domain knowledge, models, and online estimation to provide cost effective and practically feasible solutions for online emission monitoring and control in existing combustion processes. These solutions are domain specific, comprising power level, main fuel, boiler technology, process environment, and market. This thesis presents a framework to provide practically justified, online monitoring and control solutions that is applied to selected combustion applications.

    The first application is combustion control of small-scale (<0.5 MW) wood chip combustion systems, to tackle fuel feed disturbances and provide stabilized combustion conditions with improved process performance. The second application area is medium-scale (15 MW ‒ 50 MW) natural gas fired boilers. Indirect, data based, NOx monitoring methods were developed for such boilers, to cost effectively fulfil emerging monitoring requirements. The third application area is large-scale power plants (>100 MW). A novel, first principle combustion model was developed for these. The generic combustion model interlinks the combustion related measurements distributed within any boilers regardless of boiler type or fuels. The interlinking enables combustion processes to be considered as an entity that reveals if a measurement provide realistic readings compared with others. The static, computationally light model enables simultaneous data reconciliation and gross error detection and hence several attractive online applications, such as reliable estimation of unmeasured variables, and separation of process disturbances from sensor malfunctions.

    The results verify that the process performance improved in all studied practical applications, providing feasible solutions for increasing requirements.
    Original languageEnglish
    PublisherTampere University of Technology
    Number of pages84
    ISBN (Electronic)978-952-15-4017-2
    ISBN (Print)978-952-15-4007-3
    Publication statusPublished - 13 Oct 2017
    Publication typeG5 Doctoral dissertation (articles)

    Publication series

    NameTampere University of Technology. Publication
    Volume1496
    ISSN (Print)1459-2045

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