Mathematical modelling for coal fired supercritical power plants and model parameter identification using genetic algorithms

The paper presents the progress of our study of the whole process mathematical model for a supercritical coal-fired power plant. The modelling procedure is rooted from thermodynamic and engineering principles with reference to the previously published literatures. Model unknown parameters are identified using Genetic Algorithms (GAs) with 600MW supercritical power plant on-site measurement data. The identified parameters are verified with different sets of measured plant data. Although some assumptions are made in the modelling process to simplify the model structure at a certain level, the supercritical coal-fired power plant model reported in the paper can represent the main features of the real plant once-through unit operation and the simulation results show that the main variation trends of the process have good agreement with the measured dynamic responses from the power plants. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.