A real-time simulation of a 200 MW thermal power plant for optimising combustion control

This paper gave an overview of the work being carried out by The Queen´s University of Belfast TOPGEN project. The development implementation of a data server for monitoring and storing data from the Ballylumford power plant in Northern Ireland was presented. A computer power plant model was designed and validated using data collected by the data server. This plant model formed the basis of a virtual plant system that included an industrial standard distributed control system with multiple operator screens on a local area network. An FTP server was also incorporated for connection over the Internet with the software package CORAGE. The virtual plant system was then used as a test-bed for CORAGE to be tuned and tested remotely over the Internet before being applied to the Ballylumford power plant