Kalman Filter Estimation of the Coal Flow in Power Plants

In this paper the Kalman filtering method is used to estimate the fuel flow in a coal-fired power plant. The results obtained with a standard Kalman approach based on a millboiler-turbine black box model and the ones obtained with an extended Kalman filter based on a furnace nonlinear physical model have been compared. A detailed nonlinear real time simulator of an Italian power plant is used as test bench. The simulations show that a good fuel flow estimation can be achieved allowing a substantial improvement of the regulation performances.