Simple rules to make your simulator worth the investment
It can be said that no one operates a plant just like your plant. No matter how similar to another unit or to the design on paper, a generating unit or process operation ultimately takes on a 'personality' of its own. With increasing frequency, power plants and process facilities are justifying the purchase of plant specific simulators that reflect a plant's personality thus enabling effective operator training, control system validation, and engineering evaluations.When all the simulator integration and contractual testing is done, however, the success of the project is most often determined by the trainees. If the simulator is for an operating unit, senior operators will quickly determine whether your investment is worthy. A ringing endorsement is 'the simulator operates just like my plant'. The benefit is those most needing improvement in knowledge, skills, and confidence rely on the word of their peers. Unfortunately, the opposite can occur as well, making it a huge challenge for the even the best instructor to deliver effective and accepted training.
Where can things go wrong? First, the most visible part of the simulator is the trainee workstation interface. Fortunately, most of today's simulators take advantage of the benefits of virtual DCS technology. Here the process graphics, call-up response times, alarm and trend displays are identical to the actual plant as they use actual DCS vendor workstations. Second is the fact that most of the control logic simulation is also implemented in a virtual DCS environment. The exact block algorithms, configurations, and tuning constants please both engineers and trainees as they provide identical control structure.
So where does that leave the risk of causing a 'that is not my plant' senior operator stamp of disapproval? Simply put, if the DCS HMI is exact and the control logic is exact, then the quality and depth of the process models thus needs careful evaluation during proposal, design review, and testing. In the end, all the meetings, engineering, and testing cannot overcome poor simulation models that will simply not allow the simulator to exhibit proper reference plant steady state and, more importantly, dynamic responses.m
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GSE Systems, Inc is based in Sykesville, MD, USA. www.gses.com
