Coal-fired thermal power plant performance optimization using Markov and CFD analysis

Abstract

In the present stimulated business environment, power sector is playing a major role in the economic growth of India. During the last 20 years, the country had been facing a poor supply of energy and this supply–demand gap is increasing continuously. Therefore, it is important for power plants to improve its power generation capacity drastically by reducing the failure rate. In the present paper, to analyze the causes of poor availability, thermal power plant has divided into six different systems and a system comprising waste gases heating system has been considered. With the help of transition diagram, mathematical equations have been used to find out the availability. After analyzing, it was found that the value of availability is very low and boiler tube failure is one of the most critical factors for this low availability of system. The power plants have low availability causing serious concern and need to identify the responsible factors for this low availability. Boiler tube failure is identified as a responsible factor for low availability, and economizer is the zone where maximum failure occurred. From the maintenance history sheet, it was identified that economizer is a critical zone where maximum tube failures occur and the main cause of economizer failure is due to high-velocity flue gas particle, i.e., erosion. To increase the availability and minimize the failures, erosion process must be reduced in economizer tubes which is mainly responsible for economizer failure and then CFD analysis has been done for this purpose. This results in a decrease in the shutdown period of the plant and an increase in the system availability as well as the power of the system.