Start-Up Optimization of Combined Cycle Power Plants: A Field Test in a Commercial Power Plant

Requirements for the start-up operations of gas turbine combined cycle (GTCC) power plants have become more diverse and now include such items as reduced start-up time, life consumption, and fuel gas consumption. In this paper, an optimization method is developed to solve these multi-objective problems. The method obtains optimized start-up curves by iterating the search for the optimal combination of the start-up parameter values and the evaluation of multiple objective functions. The start-up curves generated by this method were found to converge near the Pareto-front representing the best trade-off between the fuel gas consumption of the gas turbine (GT) and thermal stress in the steam turbine (ST) rotor which are defined as the objective functions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed method, field tests were performed in a commercial power plant. As a result, the fuel gas consumption of HOT start-up was reduced by 22.8% compared with the past operation data. From this result, the developed method was shown to be capable of optimizing the start-up process for GTCC power plants.