Predictive control of coal mills for improving supercritical power generation process dynamic responses

The paper is to study new control strategies for improvement of dynamic responses of a supercritical power generation process through an improved control to the associated fuel preparation performed by the coal milling process. Any control actions taking for the milling process will take a long time to show their influences onto the boiler, turbine and generator responses as the whole process experiences coal transmission, grinding, drying and blowing to the furnace. The control philosophy behind the work presented in the paper is to develop a control strategy to achieve prediction of the future demand for fuel input and implement control actions at the earliest possible time. The paper starts from description of the nonlinear mathematical model developed for the supercritical coal fired power plant and then moves onto control strategy development. Finally, the simulation study has been carried out to demonstrate the effect of the new predictive control.