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Digital automation key for greenfield sites and revamps

Paul Boughton
As the latest contract announcements show, while Far East remains the major player in automation investment Eastern Europe is a lucrative market too. Sean Ottewell reports.

In accordance with the Chinese national economic development plant, power company Huaneng Group expects to raise its generating capacity to 80 GW, around ten per cent of the national total, by 2010. By 2020, the installed capacity will reach 120 GW, which will account for 12 per cent of the nation's total, with sales revenues expected to reach US$20 billion.

The company's latest investment is a contract placed with Emerson Process Management to apply its Plantweb digital plant architecture at Haimen, a new ultra-supercritical, coal-fired power plant being built in Guangdong province.

The new plant will employ digital bus technologies, an approach that has been proven to result in significant construction savings as well as ongoing operational savings for power generating facilities.

When completed, the six-unit plant (6 x 1036 MW) will have a total generating capacity of more than 6000 MW. The plant is being built in two phases, four units in the first phase and two in the second.

Under the contract, Emerson will install its Ovation expert control system for units one and two, which are expected to go into service December 2008 and March 2009, respectively. Emerson has also entered into a purchase agreement with Huaneng Group to automate units three and four.

Ultra-supercritical plants use new advanced clean coal technology that allows operation at elevated steam temperatures and pressures. Ultra-supercritical technologies are becoming more prevalent in China because they can boost the efficiency of coal-based electricity generation by more than 50 per cent, while maintaining superior environmental performance.

The digital automation solution for Haiman consists of Emerson's PlantWeb digital plant architecture with the Ovation control system and AMS Suite predictive maintenance software, as well as intelligent field devices, including Rosemount 848T temperature transmitters and Rosemount 3051 pressure/level transmitters.

For units one and two the Ovation system will monitor and control the boiler, sequence control system, electric control system, modulating control system, furnace safeguard supervisory system, flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) system and balance-of-plant processes. The Ovation system will also provide feedwater pump electro-hydraulic control and interface to the Dongfang turbine controls as well as to PLCs controlling soot blowing, dust removing, ash and slag handling, and plasma ignition.

The integrated Ovation solution will unify boiler and turbine operations, which translates into a number of significant operational benefits. Fully coordinated boiler and turbine control not only enhances unit-wide compatibility, but also contributes to improved unit stability, responsiveness and thermal efficiencies; tighter overall control of plant operations; and a more streamlined view of key plant and turbine parameters.

The contract for units 1 and 2 calls for Emerson to supply a total of 64 Ovation redundant controllers (32 per unit), 10 operator stations (five per unit) and four engineering stations (two per unit). In all, the Ovation system will manage 28 044 hard I/O points (14 022 points per unit) and will incorporate 12 Foundation fieldbus segments (six per unit) and 16 PROFIBUS DP segments (eight per unit), to network 174 Foundation fieldbus devices (87 per unit) and 154 PROFIBUS DP devices (77 per unit).

"Emerson's Ovation control system is already utilised by a number of plants owned by Huaneng Group, including Taicang, Luohuang and Yuhuan, so we were already confident in the company's automation and control technologies," said Li Yijie, I&C manager, Haimen power plant.

"Also instrumental in our selection of Emerson for phase one of the Haimen plant was the company's significant experience with other ultra-supercritical units and 1000 MW-unit projects, particularly in Asia."

In a separate development, Emerson has also won a contract to supply its Plantweb digital plant architecture and Ovation expert control system for use on the PLTU 2 Banten-Labuan power plant.

This new two-unit, 600 MW coal-fired plant is being built in Indonesia's Banten Longwan Province. The contract was awarded by Chengda Engineering Corporation of China. Emerson is engineering and installing the project.

Emerson's comprehensive PlantWeb solution includes deployment of the Ovation control system for monitoring and control of the boiler, turbine, burner management system, auxiliary system, which includes water treatment and coal handling, and balance of plant processes. Emerson will supply a total of 33 Ovation redundant controllers (15 per unit, as well as three that will be common to both units) and 23 workstations (seven per unit, plus six common to both units and three for the auxiliary system). The Ovation system, built specifically to meet the unique needs of the power generation industry, will monitor and control a total of 17,000 hard I/O points. Equipment delivery for unit one took place in mid-June and start-up is currently planned for June 2009. Equipment delivery for unit two is scheduled for July 2008 with start-up expected in August 2009.

Europe invests too

While the Far East remains the major investor in automation solutions today, Western Europe remains a substantial source of business, too.

Yokogawa Central East Europe has received an order from Austrian Energy & Environment, a major plant manufacturer, to supply electrical equipment and instrumentation for the FGD systems at the Turceni thermal power plant in Romania. This contract is estimated to be worth Euro 26 million.

The Turceni power plant, located in southwest Romania's Gorj county, is the country's largest coal-fired power plant. With a total capacity of 2310 MW (7 x 330 MW units), it generates ten per cent of the country's electricity.

As Romania joined the EU in 2007, it is required to bring its power plants' sulphur dioxide emissions into compliance with the EU environmental standards by 2011. Power plants thus have a very tight deadline for achieving this reduction, and will not be allowed to continue operation if they fail to comply. Given this situation, the Turceni Thermal Power Plant Pollution Abatement Project has elected to make use of a yen-denominated ODA loan from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) to finance the installation of FGD systems at the four facilities that it operates.

For this project, Yokogawa will provide its CENTUM VP integrated production control system; field devices such as DPharp EJX pressure/differential pressure transmitters, pH analysers, and temperature transmitters; the plant resource manager (PRM) integrated device management tool; and the Exaquantum plant information management system.

These products and systems will be delivered between 2009 and 2012, and will enter operation between the second half of 2010 and 2013, depending on power generation equipment requirements.

Yokogawa says it won this contract for two reasons: firstly because it is largest provider of control systems for industrial FGD in the Japanese market, where such technologies are state-of-the-art; secondly, because it won a similar contract to provide electrical and instrumentation equipment for the FGD facilities at a plant in neighboring Bulgaria.

The company has also announced the release of version R9.01 of the FAST/TOOLS SCADA system that is widely used in the power generation industry. Yokogawa says this enhanced version builds on the strengths and successes of its predecessors by providing a totally new state-of-the-art web-based visualisation environment and associated highly secure network infrastructure and web services.

For its part, Invensys Process Systems (IPS), has signed a contract to provide extensive automation upgrades to the Chvaletice power plant in the Czech Republic. It is the latest in a series of automation projects that IPS has carried out at Chvaletice since 1995.

Under the terms of the agreement, IPS will upgrade the existing Foxboro I/A Series system to Version 8.4, allowing the existing mesh network to handle more multiple faults and providing highly intuitive design environments, more integrated input/output functionality and predictive maintenance/field device tool technologies, along with new performance applications (Fig. 1).

Situated in Polabi, about 20 km west of Pardubice, construction on the plant began in 1973. Between 1996 and 1998, IPS carried out three contracts worth more than 200 million CZK (£6.7 million) on the plant's boiler control, turbine control and block protection systems. In 2006, the company completed an upgrade to an earlier version of I/A Series, following the original installation of Version 4 in 2000. Today the plant operates four 200 MW units, giving it a total installed generating capacity of 800 MW.

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