Thermal-Hydraulic Analysis of the Cooling Wall in Ultra Supercritical Coal-Fired Generation Plants During Deep Peaking

Abstract Due to increasingly severe environmental and climate concerns currently, renewable energy is highly penetrated around the world. However, given the intermittency and instability of renewable energy, coal-fired generation plants urgently need to undertake deep peak shaving tasks, resulting in the frequent load cycling transient processes of units. It will have a significant effect on the safe operation of the boiler components, especially for the hydrodynamic instability of cooling wall within the boiler. This paper takes a 1100 MW ultra-supercritical primary reheat coal-fired generation plants as the research object. In accordance with the heating load distribution characteristics of cooling wall, a hydrodynamic characteristic calculation model of cooling wall within the boiler is constructed based on the mass conservation, momentum conservation and energy conservation equations, which introduces numerous empirical correlations available for heat transfer and hydraulic resistance calculation at the same time. The working fluid temperature in the direction of cooling wall height at 100% THA, 75% THA, 50% THA, 40% THA and 30% THA, as well as the metal temperature of the inner, outer and fin tube walls are analyzed. The changes in metal wall temperature of cooling wall under different load cycling rates are obtained during the low load operating range of 50% THA to 30% THA. Ultimate load cycling rates of the coal-fired generation plants without causing the overtemperature issue of cooling wall is obtained. Finally, when the revised fuel supply control strategy is adopted, it is able to significantly reduce the maximum metal wall temperature during the rapid load cycling process. The maximum load cycling rate is increased from 2.5% Pe/min to 3.0% Pe/min for the loading up process.