Industrial Coal Mill Soft Sensor (iCoMS)

As coal mills are the heart of the pulverized coal preparation system in coal fired power stations, coal mill process is of great significance to safe and efficient operation. Mill control need to respond effectively to changes in plant load and coal quality. The objective of controlling a mill is to regulate the amount of coal being ground in such a way that the proper amount of pulverized fuel is fed to the burners to meet the load requirements, while maintaining optimum operation of the mill itself. On the other hand, implementation of efficient master pressure control system for the boiler needs the measurement of pulverized coal flow which is the actual fuel input for the combustion. This pulverized coal is not at all measured in many of the thermal power plants and consequently the master pressure control system for the boiler exhibits very poor efficiency. CoMS is an innovative R&D effort in this direction where a pulverized coal flow soft sensor is developed for real time implementation in the SCADA System developed by C-DAC Thiruvananthapuram using a coal mill model and Evolutionary Computational Technique.

Use Cases

Process Industries, Power Plant etc.

Salient Features

• 4th order dynamic mathematical model for coal mill
• On line system identification using Genetic Algorithm
• Provides accurate measurement of pulverized coal flow to master pressure control system