Improved load control for a steam cycle combined heat and power plant

The problem of optimum load control of steam power plants has been dealt within many technical papers during the last decades. Deregulation of the power markets and close to the (bio-) fuel source thinking has lead to a trend of small scale combined heat and power plants. These plants are usually operated according to the heat demand and therefore they spend a significant time on partial load. The load control of such plants is in general done by partial arc control. This work applies a hybrid control strategy, which is a combination of partial arc control and sliding pressure control. The method achieves further improvement in performance at partial load. Hybrid control itself is not novel and has earlier been used on traditional coal-fired condensing plants. This has, to the author's knowledge, not earlier been applied on combined heat and power plants. The results show that there is a potential for improved electricity production at a significant part of the load range. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.