Using information technology to advance the SCADA/EMS design in a power plant

The state of the art in information technology permits the advancement of a power plant's Distributed Control System (DCS). The most valuable feature is the ability to pull together all the common functions and data needed by plant engineers in a database interfaced with the plant's DCS. This dissertation describes a project designed with the above idea in a 42 MW cogeneration plant located in the University of Florida. The interface is established between the Foxboro's I/A Series DCS and two HP9000 800 Series UNIX workstations using SUN Network File System (NFS) network. The migrated SCADA system focuses on the application benefits of the most updated concepts in computer networks to energy management in power plants, such as the real time database, performance monitoring, fuel efficiency, and thermodynamics studies of plant operation. The system configuration, energy audit and thermoeconomic analysis are described, as well as some of the results obtained thus far, showing how the value of currently existing plant information system can be expanded through the use of an integrated architecture.; Based on the proposed interface, the Gator Power Academic Interface is developed to provide for the Internet a total of 562 trends of plant data in near real time. The core of the interface involves the databases of 562 selected sensors using the HP Real Time Application Platform (RTAP). A hardware-restricted router connection is established between FPC corporate network and UF network for plant security. The data from the academic interface are used for both educational and research activities at UF. One of the research attempts is to use the data to model the nonlinear power generation system using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method and artificial neural networks. A combined PCA time-delay neural network architecture is tested and the model's output satisfactorily mimicks that of the real plant.; By means of the addition of new software (EfficiencyMap), or even new hardware (PC/Windows NT) connected to the local area network, it is possible to integrate new sophisticated ideas for energy management, such as specific monitoring and operation assistance modules for efficient operation. The dissertation also describes these developments and current perspective.