Modelling and start-up optimization of a coal-fired power plant

Abstract: In the German electrical market, where no hydro power is present, the demand for regulating power is rising. The main reason for this is the expansion of solar and wind power, which is desirable from an environmental standpoint, but also introduces large and fast variations in production. To keep the necessary balance between production and consumption, the operation of thermal power plants is changing, both in terms of stand still time and load variations. For this reason the start-up procedure of the Vattenfall owned German lignite power plant Jänschwalde is investigated in this thesis. A model is created that is complex enough to describe the behaviour of the real plant reasonably accurately, while at the same time simple enough so that optimization of it can be performed with the optimization platform JModelica.org. A detailed plant developed in another thesis is used to determine parameter values and validate the behaviour of the optimization model during simulation. The startup procedure is handled as an optimal control problem, with constraints on stress in order to avoid damage and maximize the life length of components. Results for different optimization cases are finally calculated and compared.