Boiler Dynamics and Controls

Boiler Dynamics and Control Course Notes Now Available By Cyrus W. Taft, P.E. Early in my career (late 1970s) at Southern Company Services I had the opportunity to attend two one-week training courses at Power Technologies, Inc. in Schenectady NY. One course was on Power Plant Performance taught by John Westcott and the other was on Boiler Dynamics and Controls taught by Paul de Mello. Both of these courses were excellent and made a significant impression on me from the standpoint of how much there was to learn and the direction I wanted my career to go. My work at Southern and later EPRI involved both plant performance and plant control but I was more involved with control systems as time went on. Consequently, I have remained in contact with Paul de Mello over the years. I have also kept my copy of the notes from both courses as a reference. Recently Paul approached me with an offer I could not refuse. He wanted to contribute his course notes to the industry and asked if ISA POWID would like to distribute them as a service to its members. I thought it was a great idea and pursued it with the POWID Board and with ISA staff. After getting a thumbs-up from both groups I scanned the course notes into pdf files which are now available for download from the ISA POWID web site (http://www.isa.org/MSTemplate.cfm?MicrositeID=538). You can download either a single large file (~18 MB) with all the chapters included or you can download individual chapters. From the Table of Contents below it is clear that the notes cover all aspects of boiler dynamics and control. You may be thinking that these notes are pretty old so they probably are not that useful today but I beg to differ. While control hardware has certainly changed drastically in the past 30 years, boiler dynamics have not. These notes provide considerable insight into boiler dynamics including physics, modeling, analysis and actual test results. They also provide a great historical perspective on the development of modern control and simulation methods When you download the notes, please look at the Front Matter which includes Pauls biography and his thoughtful Acknowledgements to colleagues. Paul is a Fellow in both ISA and IEEE and has published over 100 technical papers on power plant and power system dynamics. ISA and POWID appreciate this generous contribution to the industry by one of the true pioneers in the area of power plant dynamics and control. Text Chapters Front Matter Table of Contents, Author Bio, Acknowledgements I. Boiler Process Dynamics and Control Overview II. General Principles and Structures in Boiler Controls III. Drum Boiler Pressure Effects IV. Drum Boiler Feedwater Controls V. Fuel and Air Controls for Drum Boilers VI. Furnace Draft Controls VII. Steam Temperature Controls VIII. Miscellaneous Control Loops IX. Controls for Once-Through Boilers X. Analog Control Hardware XI. Direct Digital Control XII. Modeling from First Principles Appendix Material A. Dynamic Systems Differential Equations Transient and Steady State Solutions Operational Impedance B. La Place Transforms C. Transfer Functions Block Diagrams D. Analog Computation State Space Numerical Methods of Differential Equation Solutions E. Feedback Control Concepts Frequency Response F. Notes on Process Control and Controller Tuning