Power Plant Modeling - White Paper (HYSYS)

2011 Aspen Technology, Inc.
AspenTech
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, the Aspen leaf logo, OPTIMIZE, and the 7 Best Practices of Engineering Excellence are trademarks of Aspen Technology, Inc. All rights
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Power Plant Modeling: Restart with Confidence and
Lower Risk During Emissions Control Revamp
An Industry White Paper
By Gary Hida, Applied Control Engineering, and Mark Gallant, Aspen Technology, Inc.
About AspenTech
AspenTech is a leading supplier of software that optimizes process manufacturingincluding oil and
gas, petroleum, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and other industries that manufacture and produce products
from a chemical process. With integrated aspenONE solutions, process manufacturers can implement
best practices for optimizing their engineering, manufacturing and supply chain operations. As a result,
AspenTech customers are better able to increase capacity, improve margins, reduce costs and become
more energy efficient. To see how the worlds leading process manufacturers rely on AspenTech to
achieve their operational excellence goals, visit www.aspentech.com.
2011 Aspen Technology, Inc. AspenTech
, aspenONE
, the Aspen leaf logo, OPTIMIZE, and the 7 Best Practices of Engineering Excellence
are trademarks of Aspen Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. 11-1055-11111
Power Plant Modeling: Restart with Confidence and Lower
Risk During Emissions Control Revamp
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Introduction
Today's new emissions control systems are very complex, challenging E&C firms with their design and construction, as
well as owner/operators with their control, operation, and maintenance. The following document discusses a 50-year old
coal fired power plant that was mandated to reduce emissions or lose their operating permit. They needed to reduce the
mercury emissions and sulfur dioxide emissions by over 95%. To do this they contracted a supplier to install a new wet
Flue Gas Desulphurization (FGD) unit.
These new environmental units are increasingly complex and operate quite differently than other power plant equipment.
The plant operations and engineering teams wanted to better understand the operation of this new equipment and how it
would work within their existing infrastructure. A single day of lost production would cost $200 to $400 thousand dollars,
so avoiding any unplanned outages was a critical concern. In order to reduce the risk of failure and increase safety, they
evaluated different scenarios for power plant restart using dynamic simulation.
A team was assembled with members from the plant, the E&C firm and a US-based process control engineering firm. They
worked to create a model-based dynamic simulation of the plant with the new equipment and ran a number of simulation
cases. They tested various startup and shutdown sequences, plant cycling, as well as a number of disturbances and trip
conditions. They then used this data to create the control logic and operating procedures long before the equipment was
even installed. We will discuss the model setup, execution, data output analysis and best practices developed.
Power Industry Dynamics
The power industry is facing many dynamic pressures today. Some markets are being deregulated, organizations are
diversifying their fleet of assets and there is the continued challenge of retaining and developing the talent pool. As the
quote states below, change is now the norm for the power industry. One of the intriguing challenges today is the
unprecedented regulatory pressures around environmental controls and constraints.
Companies from around the world are spending billions of dollars on emissions control systems. Southern Company has
published that in the last three years alone they have spent $3.1B on emissions systems to improve their fleet. This is not a
unique situation, as attested to by the annual reports of many companies in the Power industry. Many of these companies
are allocating a large portion of their capital budgets toward environmental controls.
These new environmental systems are creating additional complexity into the power industry infrastructure, challenging
the operational norms and changing industry best practices and organizational focus. If you look at these systems, they
look more like a mini chemical plant than a power plant. Chemical processes are controlling those units, posing a
challenge to power operators.
More change will happen in our industry in the next 10 years
than has happened in the last 100.
San Diego Gas & Electric
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New Emissions Control System
In this case the plant was about to receive a major new emissions control system. This was an old plant with very old
boilers, and the owner required that the FGD unit operate smoothly within the existing infrastructure and meet their
mandated safety and reliability operating standards. As this was a completely new system, determining how it is going to
work and how they were going to control it was critical. They were, after all, dropping in an advanced system into an old
facility that has been operating the same way for many years. Adding more systems, with good-sized booster fans and
more control loops, created complexity.
The plant owners objectives were to understand these key issues:
1. Sizing - Validate that the equipment specified by the supplier at a cost of 10s of millions of dollars was in fact sized
appropriately.
2. Control How will the unit work and the proper control strategy. This supplier had never installed the proposed FGD
unit on a plant with this unique boiler and control system configuration.
3. Start up How to start the unit for the first time, impact of new or seasoned bags in the bags house on future startups,
and best sequencing given different operating modes.
4. Operation - How to start, operate and shut down the unit. How will the unit respond when cycling up or down to match
grid signals?
5. Risks How stable will the plant be? They needed to understand, identify and reduce the operational risks. What
happens when certain components trip or fail?
6. Training Can we train our operators on the unit before it is installed to document best practices and update all our
procedures?
Finally, how was the installation going to impact the other planned projects during the shutdown? The plant was going
through a major revamp of the turbine and supporting systems at the same time. Could modeling help them answer all
these questions and give them critical path time back during the shutdown?
Approach
Typically, the approach to the concerns faced by this power company would be to design a control system after the
process has already been fixed and the systems are in place. The next step would be to train operators using standard
operating procedures, discovering operability and control issues during the start up and commissioning phase. This
requires a longer or extended start up phase so that they can really tune the system.
The challenge with this approach is that it can result in inherent unit operability and control problems. This in turn can
delay the start up of a plant and leave operations personnel blind to underlying safety issues. The possible cost of failure in
this typical approach led the power plant to undertake the dynamic simulation approach.
Dynamic modeling and simulation can drive many benefits as opposed to the traditional approach. For one, integrating the
design and control system early in the design phase helps pre-tune the control loops and provide a better understanding
of its stability, enabling the operator to easily make changes before the systems are live.
The operability / engineering studies help you understand the dynamic behavior and response of the new equipment. For
example, instead of just understanding how the system runs in steady state for a given load, you want to understand how
it is going to operate when you are cycling the plant up or down. You want to investigate and test all of the transitions to
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see how the unit will operate. This is especially critical as they were all concerned with disturbance handling and various
trip events. Safety is of top concern, so looking at the plant systems through dynamic simulation was key to make sure
everything operates correctly at startup, and to see how the plant is controlled and how the plant can be shut down safely
and reliably without any hazards. Static models just do not allow you to understand all these dynamics together.
Finally, dynamic simulation allowed the plant to train the operators. These new systems are complex, potentially operate
differently and create new challenges. Having the operators react to the challenges in dynamic simulation environments
allows for best practice approaches to be uncovered, developed and formalized during all phases of the plant operations.
The Process
Develop the Static Model
The plant owners chose Applied Control Engineering (ACE) as their modeling vendor. ACE collaborated extensively with
the engineering firm and the plant engineers to collect the data to model the complete unit and all the various gas flow
paths. The engineering firm had already started a static model and assembled much of the data. Using a commercially
available modeling tool, Aspen HYSYS Dynamics from AspenTech with its extensive logic library, ACE took the EPCs
process flow diagrams and built the static model, then demonstrated the model at various plant loads (See Figure 1).
Figure 1: Develop the static model.
The display in Figure 1 shows that while building and running the model, it can be customized to show the exact level of
detail required for the user. In this case, the material balance spreadsheet is displayed along with the process and control
model. This can make it very simple to verify various operating points.
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Create the Dynamic Model
Once all the information is entered and the static model is verified, ACE converted the static model to a dynamic model.
As previously noted, a dynamic model is of much more use to a controls engineer for examining possible control strategies
and for operator training. The selected modeling tool made the conversion from static to dynamic model simple and
completely seamless.
Additional control elements and strategies were then added to enable the various simulation modes (See Figure 2). This
included binary switches that allowed disturbances and other factors to be turned on and off while the model was running.
For example, this model had switches which allowed demonstrating the loss of the fluidized beds, starting and stopping of
the 3,600hp booster fan, as well as the two most important transient conditions that the plant was interested in
examining initial startup and unit cycling.
Figure 2: Control elements and strategies added.
The basic process flow diagram (PFD) display can also display real-time process conditions as shown in Figure 2. So in
real-time or model-time, the power plant engineers and operators could see how various process conditions were affected
by the simulated scenarios and various disturbance modes.
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Model Scope, Features, Assumptions and Limitations
To meet the stated goals of this project, the requirement was to model all gas flows, starting upon boiler exit through the
new booster fan, the FGD unit, bag house all the way through the stack, including all existing fans and structures.
Specifically included in this model were all the controllers, variable dampers and 5 fans controlling gas flow, the 2 existing
FD fans, the 2 existing ID fans, and the new 3,600hp booster fan. The majority of the equipment modeling and control
strategy development was around this equipment.
As we know, any model is only as good as the information that is used to build it. The selected modeling tool provided an
extensive physical property database which was used to validate and insure that the model was accurate. Given the scope
of this project, the modeling tools chemical reaction modeling features were not required and were not used.
The dynamic simulation model created enabled the engineers and plant personnel to understand how the equipment
would react once installed. As noted, the start up, shut down and trip dynamics were the key points of concern as the
booster fan would be started with the plants in full operation. The simulation covered nearly all operating modes from
minimum to maximum load and focused on the transient conditions (See Figure 3).
Figure 3: Operational modeling in Aspen HYSYS.
Simulation Scenarios
A broad series of simulations and scenarios were run. The key points that were examined during each were the gas flow,
the pressure, the fan horsepower, and the operating points. The objectives of the simulation scenarios was to see if re-
cycle of the flue gas was going to be needed and what the effect would be of clean bag or seasoned bags in the bag house.
The first scenario was steady state with the FGD unit offline. Next, they evaluated how everything would respond and
operate during the very first cycle. Finally, they studied the start up of the booster fan during a variety of plant loads. This
work provided valuable information to the engineers, confirming the static model and giving very important dynamic
information about these transitions (See Figures 4 and 5).
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Figure 4: Flows during booster fan startup, without recycle.
Figure 5: Pressures during booster fan startup, without recycle.
Other transient conditions, including cycling plant loads, were examined on the overall stability of the unit and its impact
of the selected control strategy (See Figures 6 and 7).
At the bottom of the trend you will see a multi-colored bar; this is a time display showing how far along in the simulation
the data is being displayed.
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Figure 6: The response of fan horsepower.
Figure 7: Flows during rate changes 50% to 75% to full power.
Finally, they examined what happens when the new booster fan trips with the plant in full operation. The model suggested
that the furnace pressure would initially go positive, but that if the bypass is opened then the plant could operate safely
with only a slight de-rate output.
Conclusion
The project was a great success. The unit started smoothly the first time because of the multiple scenarios tested using a
dynamic simulation approach. The smooth start was even more remarkable because a two-week delay in the turbine
rebuild resulted in only one hour of booster fan test time prior to start up.
Using the dynamic simulation modeling tool, Aspen HYSYS Dynamics, along with input from all the members of the team,
they were able to answer each business challenge. The FGD unit and booster fan was the right size, they understood how
it would work, how they will control it, what issues might be seen during start up, how to operate the new asset, and they
validated that the plant would in fact be stable while fully meeting all operating, safety and reliability standards.
A detailed technical report was produced which described all of the cases and scenarios that were run, as well as
documented the issues that were expected to be seen in the control strategy. Data collected post commissioning was
compared to the modeling data and found to be extremely close, further validating the results and the process selected.
As a direct result of the modeling, several severe control strategy problems were identified and critical refinements were
developed and further tested before the unit was installed. The plant has not experienced any issues in operations due to
control and operation of the FGD unit.
ACE and the power plant team were able to complete the modeling project under budget and weeks ahead of schedule,
and most importantly, significantly lower the startup risk for the power plants owner. With the new emissions control
system in place, the coal power plant has gone from one of the states largest polluters to one of the countries cleanest!
References and Articles
Evely, Kosowski & Kosak (2008), Improving Control System Design with Dynamic Simulation, ISA EXPO 2008.
Gas Compressor Performance Website (2011), www.mycalculations.com/chem/jmm/chem16. Authors referenced on
website:
Coker, AK; Fortran Programs for Chemical Process Design, Analysis & Simulation; Gulf Publishing Company, Houston,
1995.
Chopey, NP; Handbook of Chemical Engineering Calculations; McGraw Hill, New York, 2003.
Siemens Energy & Automation, Inc (January 2005), Combustion Management Solutions Furnace (Draft) Pressure Control,
http://cache.automation.siemens.com/dnl/zQ/zQzNjI5NjcA_51436060_HB/AD353-106r2.pdf, AD353-106.
Marlin, T., (2000). Process Control: Design Processes and Control Systems for Dynamic Performance, 334-337,426-427.
McGraw Hill, New York.
Morrison, T., (2006). Boiler Case Study: Minimizing NOx without Sacrificing Efficiency. Available online:
http://texasiof.ces.utexas.edu/PDF/Presentations/Apr3_08/SterlingChemicalsBoilerCaseStudy. June 2010.
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, aspenONE
, the Aspen leaf logo, OPTIMIZE, and the 7 Best Practices of Engineering Excellence
are trademarks of Aspen Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. 11-1055-11111

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