Feedwater Heating Allocation Optimization for Large Capacity Steam Turbine Unit Based on Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

The allocation of feedwater heating in regenerative heaters is one of the important points related to the thermoeconomy analysis of thermal power plants. Optimizing the allocation of feedwater heating can obtain obvious economic benefits without additional equipment investment or material consumption. Based on a modified particle swarm optimization (PSO), this paper proposes a numerical model for feedwater heating allocation problem in selecting the optimum feedwater heating allocation of large capacity steam turbine unit. A real case of a 600 MW steam turbine unit shows that the optimized results are significantly better than the original design value. The proposed method is convenient for analyzing and solving the problem of optimum feedwater heating allocation, and the results presented in this work should have important implications in the design and tapping energysaving potential of large capacity steam turbine unit.