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.