Quantitative Assessment of the Performance Improvement in a Coal Thermal Power Plant

Abstract

A scheduled routine maintenance is crucial in optimizing a unit in a coal thermal power plant. The study focused on the diagnostic analyses of the “before and after” data obtained from the unit cards and power meters in one of the Eskom’s “once-through” 600 MW coal boiler power plant. The data set collected from the metering cards and the power meters installed in the designated unit of the coal thermal power plant (the main stream super heater temperature, the mass of coal burnt, the auxiliary power consumed, the cold and hot well condenser temperature and the power generated) for the “before and after outage” scenarios were used to justified the improvement in the efficiency. The results obtained from both scenarios showed that the average power generated and the average main stream super heater temperature was 474.46 MW and 476.29 oC for the “before outage and 528.18 MW and 533.41 oC for the “after outage”. In addition, the heating rate (HR) of the unit in the coal thermal power plant “before and after outage” was 2.17 and 2.32 MWh/ton, respectively. Hence, we can conclude that after the energy efficiency intervention in the unit of the coal thermal power plant, there was an increase in the heating rate of 0.16 MWh/ton.