Exploring a Variant of PTC 42013 for RealTime Performance Monitoring of Fossil Fuel Power Plants

Abstract

This paper describes a realtime performancemonitoring method based on PTC 42013 that was developed for determining and reporting the annual heat rate for fossil fuel power plants. Unlike for the PTC 4 test, the coal composition is typically not known in realtime, so the procedure uses a modified outputloss approach applied to a control volume that closely conforms to the boiler. A calibration approach utilizes an ultimate analysis to describe the coal being burned during the calibration, while holding the plant load and other factors steady. This permits the calculation of correction factors used during realtime performance monitoring. Based on several assumptions that are justified within, a realtime estimate of coal composition is obtained. The losses are calculated in a similar manner to PTC 42013. However, the losses are expressed on a perpound of asfired coal basis, as opposed to a percentage of higher heating value of the coal, which is not known in realtime.