Fuzzy logic supervisory control for coal power plant

A new type of fossil fuel power plant was developed by two German companies, Rheinbraun and RWE. This new type of fossil fuel power plant uses brown coal. The brown coal is first gasified and then the gas is used to run a combined gas turbine/steam turbine process. Rheinbraun developed the process that is used to gasify the brown coal. It has been used and optimized since 1985 in a large-scale demonstration plant. This demo plant is equipped with a conventional control system. But to be able to build the new type of power plant the following improvements are necessary: more exact control of gas throughput; increased degree of automation; and automatic adaptation of the control to different coal qualities. A supervisory fuzzy logic control was added to the control system to achieve these improvements. Fuzzy logic technology was used because of the nonlinear MIMO characteristics of the process. Fuzzy logic also makes it very easy to convert the extensive operator knowledge into a clearly defined control strategy