Implementation of high availability SCADA system for superheater steam temperature control in a 210 MW thermal power plant

This paper describes the hardware and software components used in a Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), Thiruvananthapuram, for Advanced Steam Temperature Control of a 210 MW thermal power plant boiler. Details of how this SCADA system implements desirable property like fault tolerance and high availability is outlined. Additionally, the paper also discusses the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) based predictive steam temperature control algorithm running in the Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) of this SCADA system. This algorithm is compared against the cascaded PID scheme used in conventional steam temperature control. Establishing the effectiveness of this SCADA system in increasing the availability of the system and reducing the process lag associated with conventional steam temperature control is the main objective of this paper.