Innovative Research and Development project now underway
24 October 2016
Following the first few months of the collaborative R & D project with Greenbank, Drax and the University of Nottingham, we are excited to start getting more involved as our role in the project increases.
In case you missed the launch, here’s a quick recap of the project objective. Using InnovateUK funding, we are looking to develop an Intelligent Flow Control System (IFCS) for Coal Fired Power Stations (CFPS). The system will be fully automated and will adjust to suit modulation in flow performance of mill, fuel types, quality, wear and load. It will provide flow feedback, allowing burners to achieve optimum stoichiometric conditions, thereby increasing plant flexibility and responding better to demand from the grid.
The first few months revolved around information gathering and researching the best approach to the solution. This mainly related to UoN and Greenbank gathering data from existing equipment to understand how the existing equipment performs and a research review for algorithm development.
Recently, attention has turned to developing the scaled down prototype to prove out the theory. Argenta’s involvement to develop a solution to bring all measurements and control algorithms into a single application is about to kick off. The application will be developed using National Instruments hardware and software platforms, which is an area Argenta has a wealth of experience in.
We are aiming to get the prototype configured and running by the end of the year. We started investigation into the use of NI Veristand as the software platform. This is in the early stages, but may be the chosen approach giving the flexibility to quickly implement changes to the main algorithm. In parallel to this we are compiling a software specification to capture all the requirements of the system.
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