Sensor Response and Sensor Network Development for Practical Combustors

Meeting environmentally benign clean energy demands with expected growing population in the near term requires the development of smarter combustors and power plants. The future power plants will need to be more efficient and emit near zero emissions. This will require a significantly improved realtime control and analysis system. A single sensor from a combustor or any component in a power plant unit provides inadequate information about the fate of various ongoing processes within the system. We envision that future advanced power plants will have a large number of sensors to provide comprehensive information about the fate of various ongoing processes in the combustion system. Incorporating a large number of sensors in a sensor network will allow one to obtain comprehensive information, which can then be processed to visually display the detailed behavior in real time and support advanced control systems that can formulate the plant behavior. In this paper, we provide systematic development of a single sensor response from a combustor to understand the sensor´s response on location and operational parameters. The results reveal the need for multiple sensor arrays for detailed visualization, analysis, and process control. These results will be used as a guideline for determining the type and nature of high density sensor network around the combustor of a power plant. Different issues and algorithms about high-density sensor networks in advanced combustors are also discussed.