Abstract
After more than one century from its first use for electric power production, steam cycles are still the object of continuous research and development efforts worldwide. Indeed, owing to its favorable thermodynamic properties, steam cycles are not only used in coal-fired power plants but in a large variety of applications such as combined cycles, concentrated solar power plants and polygeneration plants. On the other hand, to cope with the efficiency and flexibility requirements set by today’s energy markets, the design and the operation of steam cycles must be carefully optimized. A key rule is played by the simulation and optimization codes developed in the last 30 years. This paper provides an introduction to the main types of simulation and optimization problems (design, off-design operation and dynamic), an overview of the mathematical background (possible solution approaches, numerical methods and available software), and a review of the main scientific contributions.
Highlights
Steam cycles have been used for electric power generation from coal since the early 1900’s
Examples of conventional steam cycle-based power plants include coal-fired power plants (Speight, 2013), gas-steam turbine combined-cycles (Kehlhofer et al, 2009), and nuclear power plants (Rinzic, 2017); examples of novel plant concepts include concentrated solar power plants (Peinado Gonzalo et al, 2019), integrated solar combined-cycles (Dersch et al, 2004), Steam Cycle Simulation and Optimization waste to energy plants (Bogale and Viganò, 2014), integrated gasification combined-cycles (Martelli et al, 2011), electricity/ hydrogen/synfuels polygeneration plants (Larson et al, 2009), power plants with CO2 capture and storage (Spinelli et al, 2015) and all the cycles that are designed for industrial processes
A key rule in the research and development activities is being played by simulation and optimization codes, which are used to predict the effects of the design/control improvements on the performance of the overall power plant
Summary
Steam cycles have been used for electric power generation from coal since the early 1900’s. 2) The thermodynamic steady-state simulation of the cycle at design conditions (full-load, nominal ambient/site conditions) is performed using an ad hoc software (either internally developed by the company/university, like GS (Consonni, 1983), or commercially available like Thermoflex/GT PRO/ Steam Pro (Thermoflow, 2021), Aspen Tech (2021), Cycle Tempo (2021), Gate Cycle (2021) and Ebsilon Professional (2021) and setting the key design variables (steam pressures, steam temperatures, pinch temperature differences in the heat exchangers, etc.) according to the recommended industrial standards (Kehlhofer et al, 2009; Martelli et al, 2011b; Woodruff et al, 2017). Works available in the literature tackled only one or two of the above-mentioned design steps
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