The use of concentrated solar thermal energy for the production of electricity has been achieved commercially with the generation of steam in trough or tower concentrating systems. More recently, solar power stations such as the AndaSol 1 have also included 1,010 MW·h of heat storage, enough to run the turbine for about 7.5 hours at full-load. The thermal storage in the AnderSol 1 solar power s...

Steam turbines consist essentially of a casing to which stationary blades are fixed on the inside and a rotor carrying moving blades on the periphery. The rotor is fitted inside the casing with the rows of moving blades penetrating between the rows of fixed blades. Thus steam flowing through the turbine passes alternately through fixed and moving blades with the fixed blades directing the steam...

The optimal approach to condition assessment, regardless of the component involved, is to use a programmatic approach, and steam chest condition assessment is no exception. Steam chests typically vary significantly from one to the next in shape and complexity; consequently, stress distributions vary and damage occurs first and is most advanced at the high stress regions, accordingly. One of the...

A thermal power station is a power plant in which the prime mover is steam driven. Water is heated, turns into steam and spins a steam turbine which drives an electrical generator. After it passes through the turbine, the steam is condensed in a condenser and recycled to where it was heated; this is known as a Rankine cycle. The greatest variation in the design of thermal power stations is due ...

This paper presents a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model for performing structural and parameter optimization of utility plants that satisfy given electrical, mechanical and heating demands of industrial processes. In this model a nonlinear objective function that accounts for the cost of equipment and operation is minimized. The proposed approach allows for the simultaneous opti...

Performance of a gas turbine mainly depends on the inlet air temperature. The power output of a gas turbine depends on the flow of mass through it. This is precisely the reason why on hot days, when air is less dense, power output falls. The objective here is to assess the advanced systems applied in reducing the gas turbine intake air temperature and examine the merits from integration of the ...

Fault diagnosis is an important task for the normal operation and maintenance of equipment. In many real situations, the diagnosis data cannot provide deterministic values and are usually imprecise or uncertain. Thus, interval-valued fuzzy sets (IVFSs) are very suitable for expressing imprecise or uncertain fault information in real problems. However, existing literature scarcely deals with fau...

A superheater is an essential part of the steam generation process in the boiler-turbine system. Reliable control of temperature in the superheated steam temperature system is necessary to guarantee efficiency and high load-following capability in the operation of coal-fired Thermal power plant. The PI and PID controllers are extensively used in cascade control of secondary superheated steam te...

A new cogeneration installation was in the process of being commissioned when severe subsynchronous vibration was detected on the generator during no load tests. Subsequently, two rotordynamics problems were discovered. These problems prohibited the steam turbine generator set from reaching full speed. Additional vibration problems were anticipated once the generator was loaded and the steam fl...