Posted by Stephen Rogers on November 05, 2001 at 02:34:31:
I am part of a group of Final Year Masters students in
Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Queens University Belfast. We are beginning an industrial project involving the control of boilers particularly large industrial boilers found in factories throughout the world. We aim to design an intelligent device which will be placed alongside the boiler system and will create an idealized model of the system and
monitor and assess the performance of the boiler in comparison with the model. It could then be used to optimize the boiler i.e. control the inputs to maximise the output, as a warning when there is a problem with the boiler and as a general indicator of when maintenance is needed due to significant performance degradation over time. We need information regarding the present control of boilers, any help you can give regarding the following questions would be greatly appreciated:
1. What control is built in to the boilers at present?
2. Does it indicate a gradual decline in performance?
3. Would an intelligent device that learnt the system on-line and built up an ideal model of the boiler for comparison in performance be useful for:
a) optimizing the output of the boiler and/or
b) giving an indication when maintainance is needed?
4. How could we get infomation from the boiler regarding the temperature, pressure, input flow rates of oil, output etc? Is this information already available on the boilers?
5. Is there any other way the control of the boiler could be improved?
Please send us any other contacts or information that could be useful in this area,
Thanks for your time,