Efficiency improvement strategies for the feedwater heaters network designing in supercritical coal-fired power plants

• A strategy is presented for steam cycle design in supercritical units.
• Thermodynamic and economic approaches are accomplished.
• A case application study shows a power plant efficiency increase up to 0.7 points.
• Economic results are presented and confirm thermodynamic approach.

Coal will continue playing a major role in worldwide electricity generation during next years. This trend will augment CO2 emission to the atmosphere. Improving power plant efficiency could alleviate the negative effect of coal consumption on CO2 emissions. Main efforts have been focused on supercritical boiler technology (once-through units) and materials development (austenitic steels) with the aim of accomplishing high steam parameters that allow this efficiency enhancement. However, improvement in supercritical steam parameters should be followed by an exhaustive review of the steam cycle design. This paper shows a strategy for the optimization of the feedwater heaters network and the flue gas heat recovery system design. Starting with the lay-out of a supercritical steam cycle using the best available technology, this paper analyses not only the steam cycle itself, but also its integration with the boiler cold-end. By means of thermodynamic optimization it is possible to propose new feedwater heat exchanger network configurations and reducing steam consumption from turbine bleeds, achieving optimum power plant efficiency. Simulations have been carried out using Aspen Plus software and optimization procedure is based on a sequential quadratic programming method that maximized overall plant efficiency taking turbine bleeds pressure as independent variables. Results show a feasible improvement of the overall plant efficiency of 0.7 points in comparison with state-of-the-art reference plant. This increase implies a direct reduction of CO2 emissions of about 1.3% compared with the best plant currently available. Moreover, an economic analysis confirms the feasibility of the proposals analysed and shows important additional yearly incomes.