Diagnosis system to improve heat rate in fossil power plants

Today fossil fuel power plants is showing a trend toward full automation. This increases the difficulty for human operators to follow in detail the progress of power plants, and also limit the contribution of human operators to diagnostic task. Therefore, automated and intelligent fault diagnostic systems have been intensively investigated. Despite several successful examples of diagnostic systems, often called expert systems, the development task of a diagnostic system still remains empiric and is unique for each system. This paper discusses the design of a Diagnostic System to improve Heat Rate for fossil fuel power plant. The approach is characterized as an fault tree diagnostic system. The prototype of this system has showed the benefits and the feasibility of using this system to diagnose equipment in power plants.