Simulating thermal power plant processes on a message passing environment

Abstract

Simulators play a very important role in the operation of thermal power plants and also in the design of control systems for these plants. To cater to this requirement elaborate methodologies have been developed to simulate thermal power plant processes in an interactive way. Due to the intensive computations involved, such simulators use one or more high through-put computers known as the simulation computers. This paper puts forward a method where parallel processing on a low latency message passing environment has been used to simulate thermal power plant processes following a modular approach. This eliminates the need of an expensive high through-put simulation computer, thus cutting down the hardware cost associated with a simulator and increasing the system reliability manifold.