PINCH TECHNOLOGY APPROACH FOR INTEGRATED DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF POWER PLANTS

摘要

The large industrial growth, modernization and automation of services have sharply driven up the demand of power. The limited resources are unable to adequately meet the additional requirement and there is a huge gap between the demand and supply of power. The scarcity of power has drawn the attention of designers and policy makers alike, and now the thrust is on power saving, conservation and efficiency improvement of power plants. The pressures from environment conservation agencies and stricter emission discharge norms have added to the cost of power production. The advances and developments in the design of power plants have, however, been largely concentrated in the area of equipment design & improvement, better control and monitoring systems etc. There has been little focus on the efficient utilization of the existing resources for improving efficiency and profitability of the plant. There is a need to analyze the problem in totality and address the issues of plant efficiency, resource conservation and emissions control together. This requires a set of tools and techniques, which not only can handle these issues simultaneously but also can produce an efficient integrated design. Pinch technology is one such technique that has a successful track record of many energy conservation applications and has, over a period of time, emerged as a powerful tool for integrated design and analysis of process, utility and power systems. It considers all possible sources and sinks of energy and resources in a system in an integrated manner and explores their maximum economic utilization, thereby minimizing demands of external sources. This paper discusses the usefulness of Pinch analysis for steam power plants. It has been shown that the technique yields an efficiency improvement of the order of 1 - 3 % over the traditional design approach.