Design and Construction of a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System for full scale combustion test facility

Abstract:

One of major concerns in gas turbine industry is to reduce emissions.  Tow kind of approaches could be identified in the industry to reduce emissions, namely Primary Emission Reduction approach and Secondary Emission Reduction approach. The primary approach concerns emission prevention in combustion, while secondary approach is all about emission cleanup before releasing to the atmosphere.

Combustion flame temperature highly influences on emissions specially NOx formation.  NOx emission is lower when the combustor operates close to lean flammability limit. Incorporating catalyst to combustor is one of methods to extend flammability limit.  Heat and Power Division at KTH-Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has developed a test facility to test performances of catalyst in combustion.

The combustion test facility available at Heat & Power Davison at KTH, consists of high pressure air compressor and air flow control system, air preheating unit and control system, fuel flow control system, combustor unit, and exhaust gas analyzer system. But lack of proper user interface to control and monitor the operation of the test facility through a computer work station was a major concern from experimenters.

The purpose of the thesis work is to design and construction of supervisory control and data acquisition system for the full scale catalytic combustion test facility.  Labview 2012 is used as the main platform for implementing data acquisition and control system for the test facility. Thermocouples, pressure transducer signals, air flow meter signal are connected to Keithley 2701 data acquisition system and then connected to the computer. Fuel flow controllers are directly connected to the computer via serial port. Air flow control actuator signal is given through ADAM digital to analogue converter.

Developed GUI is more convenient for users in terms of easy control of air flow, fuel flow and gas sampling probe systems, and monitoring of temperature, pressure measurements and exhaust gas species systems. And also GUI provides web interface to select correct conversion factor, and also to view live data recording. The developed GUI can be accessed through online to monitor the operation.