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Circulation Boiler
K. S. Bhambare
Modeling of a natural circulation boiler for a coal-fired thermal power station is pre-
Sushanta K. Mitra1 sented here. The boiler system is divided into seven subcomponents, and for each section,
e-mail: skmitra@me.iitb.ac.in models based on conservation of mass, momentum, and energy are formulated. The
pressure drop at various sections and the heat transfer coefficients are computed using
U. N. Gaitonde empirical correlations. Solutions are obtained by using SIMULINK. The model is validated
by comparing its steady state and dynamic responses with the actual plant data. Open
Department of Mechanical Engineering, loop responses of the model to the step changes in the operating parameters, such as
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, pressure, temperature, steam flow, feed water flow, are also analyzed. The present model
Mumbai, 400076, India can be used for the development and design of effective boiler control systems.
DOI: 10.1115/1.2719209
Introduction 2. Here, the drum level modeling was not considered by the
authors. Adam and Marchetti 9 have developed a model for
Large boilers with pulverized coal firing and natural circulation
simulation of drum and evaporator tubes. Their model consists of
are widely used in power generation. A well designed control
two sub-models: one for vertical riser tubes, which the other rep-
system and trained operators are essential for reliable, safe and resents the phase separation in the drum.
efficient operation of the plant. Simulators play an important role Hence, in order to understand the complete steady state and
in achieving these objectives. Hence, simulation of the boiler dynamic behavior of the boiler, it is important to model each
helps to understand its behavior under both steady and transient component, i.e., drum, downcomer-riser loop, radiant superheat-
operations. ers, furnace, and reheaters, separately. Existing models tried to
In the last decade or so, a number of models are suggested in address this issue in a limited sense under certain restricted sim-
literature to study the dynamic response of natural circulation plifications. The present work addresses these submodels in a de-
boiler. Chein et al. 1 presented a model for dynamic simulation tailed manner and also incorporates the effect of number of guns
of boiler where the boiler is divided into lumped-parameter sec- in service and the burner tilt on boiler performance. The simula-
tions. In their model, it is assumed that the steam quality is same tion is performed for both the steady state and transient conditions
through out the riser section in the waterwalls. Their model pre- using SIMULINK. The results are compared with the steady state
dicted pressure changes with the variation in steam and feed water and transient plant data.
flows. Kwan and Anderson 2 enhanced the model presented by
Chein et al. 1 for a 200 MW coal-fired, drum type, natural cir-
culation boiler by incorporating models for attemperator and tur-
bine. The effect of number of guns in service and their tilt on the
boiler performance was modeled by Usoro 3. It was found that Plant Description
the order in which the guns are in operation has an effect on the
boiler performance. Tysso 4 suggested a model for parameter The plant data used for simulation are from a thermal power
station whose boiler is a natural circulation, single drum, single
estimation of a ship boiler, where modeling is carried out for
reheat, balanced draft type with tilting tangential burners for pul-
drum, waterwalls, and downcomers only. The model assumed that
verized coal firing. The gross output of the unit is 250 MW with a
the condensation of steam does not take place in the drum. A more
fundamental model was developed by Lu 5 where two models, typical steam flow rate of 760 t / h, drum pressure of 165 kg/ cm2,
one for single-phase water/steam and another for two-phase, are and the superheater and reheater outlet temperature of 540 C.
used for volume calculations. Astrom and Bell 6 presented a Such a boiler system can be modeled by dividing it into the fol-
lowing subsystems:
model for simulation of natural circulation boiler that incorporates
steam distribution in drum and waterwall components. The distri- Downcomer
bution of steam in risers was considered in a linear model. They Riser
assumed that the steady state results obtained from conservation Waterwall
equations also hold under dynamic condition. The water level in Drum
the drum can be modeled by mass and energy balances, as carried Superheater and reheater
out by Liu et al. 7 for a 300 MW power unit. Attemperator
On the other hand, simulations have also been performed to Furnace
understand the steady state behavior of the boiler. Lo et al. 8
developed a mathematical model of a 300 MW, natural circulation The simplified block diagram of the boiler system used in the
drum type boiler, based on the work done by Kwan and Anderson thermal power station is shown in Fig. 1, where the solid lines
denote the water and steam paths and the broken lines denote the
flue gas path. The inputs for each subsystem are fed from the
1
Corresponding author. outputs of the adjoining subsystem, thereby achieving a closely
Contributed by the Fuels & Combustion Technologies Division of ASME for
publication in the JOURNAL OF ENERGY RESOURCES TECHNOLOGY. Manuscript received
coupled overall system. In the next section, models are proposed
May 2, 2005; final manuscript received April 1, 2006. Review conducted by C. for individual subsystem to obtain the various inputs and outputs,
Thomas Avedisian. as labeled in Fig. 1.
Journal of Energy Resources Technology Copyright 2007 by ASME JUNE 2007, Vol. 129 / 159
Methodology and d is the density of the water at drum pressure. The momen-
Models are developed for each subsystem by applying conser- tum conservation yields the following equation
vation of mass, momentum, and energy principles. The pressure 2
CLmdi fldm 2
di di
ld dm
drop and heat transfer coefficients are computed using empirical Pdr Pdo = + drgld + 2
correlations. The choice of correlation is such that the rms error
2
2Adf dr 2
2dAdf dr Adf dt
associated with it for a given flow situation is minimum 10. The where Pdr is the drum pressure, Pdo is the pressure at downcomer
following general assumptions are made in developing the boiler outlet, ld is length of the downcomer pipe, Adf is the downcomer
model. Assumptions specific to a subsystem are discussed in re- flow area, f is the friction factor, and CL is the loss coefficient, the
spective section modeling. value of which is taken as 0.04 11. Each term in the RHS of Eq.
A lumped parameter approach is used in modeling the sys- 2 refers to the pressure drop corresponding to entry, friction
tem. P f , gravity Pg and inertia Pa, respectively. Darcy-
Any property of a component at a given cross section is Weisbachs formula for pressure drop due to friction is used here.
suitably represented by a single effective value. For ex- For the boiler system under consideration, there are six downcom-
ample, temperature of the steam at inlet to platen super- ers, which start from the drum sideways and end up in forming a
heater varies across the cross section, but this is represented ring header at the bottom of the furnace. Single-phase pressure
by a single effective inlet temperature. This allows working drop for a network of a parallel pipe system is used for this cal-
in one-dimensional framework. culation.
Feed water temperature is assumed to be constant. Riser. For the riser section, it is assumed that water enters the
Heat transfer coefficients are determined from steady state riser at saturation temperature corresponding to the drum pressure.
operating conditions. The variation in drum pressure causes a change in heat transfer
Downcomer. It is assumed that the downcomer liquid tempera- rate, which results in a change in evaporation rate. The momen-
ture is same as the drum liquid temperature and that there is neg- tum conservation for the riser subsystem can be written as
ligible heat loss from downcomer tubes. The mass conservation wo
lw dm
for the downcomer section can be written as Pdo Pwo = P f + Pg + Pa + 3
Awf dt
d
do = Vd d
di m
m 1 where Pwo is the pressure at the waterwall outlet, lw is length of
dt wo is the mass flow
the riser pipe, Awf is the riser flow area, and m
where m do are the mass flow rates at the inlet and outlet of
di and m rate at the waterwall outlet. The first three terms in the RHS of Eq.
the downcomer, respectively, Vd is the volume of the downcomer, 3 can be combined together as the total pressure drop, PTP, for
dV f
dihwo hdi + m
m sh s f h f gh g
eoh f heo m
eoheo m
dP dt
= 14
dt dhg dg dh f d f d
Vg 2g + hg 2 + V f 2 f + hf 2 + Vwhwo
dp dp dp dp dp
Qmw = iAsTm T 19
Results and Discussion
Inputs for the boiler model are design parameters such as boiler
where i is the forced convective heat transfer coefficient deter- geometry and operational parameters such as steam flow, fuel fir-
mined by using Petukhov correlation 15 and As is the inner ing rate, and feed water flow. The outputs are various thermal
surface of the tube. parameters like main steam pressure, temperature, dryness frac-
Attemperator Model. Attemperators are situated in the steam tion, etc. The subsystems described above are connected together
line after the primary superheaters and before the point where the using SIMULINK. Various subroutines are written in MATLAB for
steam enters the secondary superheaters. Temperature control is calculating the properties of water, steam, and flue gas. A fourth-
obtained by varying the flow of attemperator spray water. It is order Runge-Kutta scheme is implemented in the numerical cal-
assumed that there is no pressure drop in the attemperator. Boiler culations. Each subsystem is tested for its characteristics, the re-
feedwater is used for attemperator spray. The conservation of sults of which are described here.
mass and energy for this subsystem can be written as Figure 3 shows the response of the mass flow rate in the
downcomer-riser circuit for drum pressure P = 16180 kPa and dry-
m a=m
ai + m si 20 ness fraction xe = 0.17. As observed in Fig. 3, there is a negligible
difference between the two time steps, hence a time step of 1 s is
aihai + m
m ah a = m
sihsi 21 used for all subsequent calculations. It is found that a steady state
where, m ai, m
a, m
si are the mass flow rates of steam at the attem- is obtained for a mass flow rate of 1666 kg/ s. The effect of ramp
perator inlet, mass flow rate of spray water, and mass flow rate of unity slope increase in pressure on circulation rate is shown in
steam at superheater inlet, respectively. Fig. 4. The increase in pressure decreases the density difference
between saturated water in downcomer and steam water mixture,
Furnace. The heat transfer rate from the furnace flue gases to which causes a drop in the circulation rate. The effect of step
the waterwall is by radiation only. The effective gas temperature is increase in dryness fraction is shown in Fig. 5. The initial values
calculated by using the following relation of pressure drop are Pa = 1550.7 Pa, Pg = 251,106 Pa, P f
flow rate. As the feedwater flow rate increases, there is an increase ultimate analysis of the coal for this data set SET 2. The input
in the total water volume, which causes the drum level to increase. data used for the dynamic simulation is provided in Table 4. Fig-
The decrease in pressure reduces the saturation temperature, and ure 11 shows the response of the plant data where the set-point for
hence an initial swell in dryness fraction is observed here. the main steam pressure is achieved after 400 s. The correspond-
The steady state plant data are collected for a commercial ther- ing drum pressure variation is shown in Fig. 12. It is observed that
mal power plant using coal, the ultimate analysis for which is the main steam pressure reaches the set-point value much
provided in Table 1 SET 1. The plant has a control system de- earlieraround 200 s. This difference can be accounted for by the
veloped by ABB. The instrumentation allows the recording of fact that the time delay of the firing system is not incorporated in
temperature and pressure at various locations in the plant. The the present model, which would require input from the ball and
process parameters after measuring are sent to one central proces- tube mills. It is found that after some oscillations, the main steam
sor where values are stored, and the stored data are used in this pressure reaches the set-point value, similar to the plant data.
paper. The error involved in the measurement is 1%. From the
ultimate analysis of coal and excess air percentage, the amount of
air required and weight of the flue gas produced per kg of coal is Conclusions
calculated. The main steam pressure is calculated by subtracting In the present work, a mathematical model for a coal-fired natu-
the pressure drop in superheaters from that in the drum. Table 2 ral circulation boiler has been developed. The boiler system is
shows the data recorded for the given boiler and those obtained divided into seven submodels, viz., downcomer, riser, waterwall,
from the steady state simulation. A good agreement is found be-
tween the simulation and actual parameters of the boiler.
Another set of plant data is obtained for which the boiler master
pressure setpoint is changed almost instantaneously from
145 kg/ cm2 to 140 kg/ cm2. Response of the boiler to this change
until it attains the set-point pressure is observed. Table 3 gives the
Fig. 12 Simulated drum pressure in response to the steam pressure set-point change by
5kg/ cm2
Kamalesh Bhambare is currently working as a CFD analyst in Mahindra Engineering Design & Devel-
opment Company Ltd., India. Prior to this assignment, he was a member of Research and Development
group in Thermax Babcock and Wilcox Ltd., India. He received his M.Tech. in Energy Systems Engineering
from IIT Bombay in July 2004. Prior to his Masters degree, he worked for three years as an operation and
maintenance engineer in Reliance Energy Ltd, India. His research interests are in boiler design and control,
combustion, and computational fluid dynamics.
Sushanta K. Mitra received his Ph.D. from University of Waterloo, Canada. He worked in the Nuclear
Safety Analysis Division of Ontario Power Generation, Canada. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in
Mechanical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and also the Principal Investigator of
IITB-ONGC Joint Research Centre and Co-Investigator of Suman Mashruwala Engineering Laboratory.
He is a registered professional engineer of Ontario, Canada.