"Starting in 2000, we had seen renewed interest in conventional steam power plants amongst developers interested in coal or residual oil, as the price of natural gas began to climb ..." says Dr. Maher Elmasri, Thermoflow’s president, "... that’s when we decided that we had to start integrating PEACE with STEAM PRO, to help our customers investigate all their options, from both performance and economics perspectives".

The new version of STEAM PRO automates the preliminary engineering process for conventional steam power plants, sizing all the main components, such as boiler and steam turbine, and the balance of plant equipment, such as piping and pumps. The conceptual engineering designs created by the program provide a rational basis for its estimate of the plant costs, for equipment, material, and labour.

According to Dr. Elmasri, the biggest challenge lay in developing automated procedures for estimating the size and cost of the boiler as a function of its fuel. The type of fuel, its composition, heating value, sulphur content, moisture content, ash content, and ash composition, all play a strong role in determining the dimensions of the furnace and of the radiant and convective sections. Thus, procedures had to be developed to automatically pick appropriate values for key technical design parameters, as a function of fuel characteristics. These technical parameters, such as excess air, stack temperature, furnace exit temperature, furnace geometry, convective section geometry, gas velocity, etc, have a profound effect on the thermodynamics and heat transfer within the boiler, and hence on the boiler’s size, weight, and cost. Although all these parameters are inputs to the program, which the user may adjust, Thermoflow felt that most of its customers would prefer to rely on expert logic within the program to create suitable values that depend solely on the user’s fuel definition. To further assist the user, a data base of common coals, with all their pertinent characteristics, has also been incorporated into the program. Additionally, STEAM PRO/PEACE includes cost functions for pollution control equipment, such as flue gas desulphurisation and electrostatic precipitators, to help assess the costs of environmental compliance.

Although STEAM PRO/PEACE includes a wealth of engineering detail and enough flexibility to satisfy most experts, its automated design procedures and user-friendliness allow it to be effectively used by engineers who possess various levels of experience and expertise.

Main Outputs Screen for a 350-MW coal fired steam plant from the new STEAM PRO/PEACE Version 11