Improvement of conventional power plants behaviour by qualified maintaining of plant systems at optimal conditions by control system completed by on the simulation based operator suport system

The paper deals with problems of power and heating plants optimal operation. There is described present state of operated plants performance of older concept (usually used steps to increase plant power and to achieve required environmental emission limits) and boundaries which can limit the plant management effort to achieve a higher plant performance level. The attention is paid mainly to conventional power plants, which are in Europe mostly more than twenty years old and their unit power is mostly in power range 100 - 300 MW. There is described impact of the plant automatic control system level enhancement comparing with higher qualified manual operator implementation on plant performance, on decrease operational costs and achievement lower limits on the plant emissions. The topic of the paper is to demonstrate a possible way how to improve the plant performance and to achieve these requirements by using an advanced computerized support system for the operator. Such a computerized system called DECISION SUITE was developed in the Czech company I&C Energo under collaboration with the Czech Technical University and other Czech companies and is described in the paper. The system works with validated measured data and provides concentrated information about achievable plant performance, real loss, degradation of important systems, etc and recommendation for the plant operators. It presents results from the system application at an older Czech power plant. There is demonstrated how utilization of concentrated information provided by the support system can help to the plant performance increase (plant efficiency, emissions and plant reliability) comparing with utilization of the operator experience by manual inputs only.