Flexible operation of supercritical power plant via integration of thermal energy storage

© 2018 The Author(s).This chapter presents the recent research on various strategies for power plant flexible operations to meet the requirements of load balance. The aim of this study is to investigate whether it is feasible to integrate the thermal energy storage (TES) with the thermal power plant steam-water cycle. Optional thermal charge and discharge locations in the cycle have been proposed and compared. Dynamic modeling and simulations have been carried out to demonstrate the capability of TES integration in supporting the flexible operation of the power plant. The simulation software named SimuEngine is adopted, and a 600 MW supercritical coal-fired power plant model is implemented onto the software platform. Three TES charging strategies and two TES discharging strategies are proposed and verified via the simulation platform. The simulation results show that it is feasible to extract steam from steam turbines to charge the TES and to discharge the stored thermal energy back to the power generation processes. The improved capability of the plant flexible operation is further studied in supporting the responses to the grid load demand changes. The results demonstrated that the TES integration has led to much faster and more flexible responses to the load demand changes.Peer reviewe

Magnetic properties of spin-1/2 Fermi gases with ferromagnetic interaction

We investigate the magnetic properties of spin-$1/2$ charged Fermi gases with ferromagnetic coupling via mean-field theory, and find the interplay among the paramagnetism, diamagnetism and ferromagnetism. Paramagnetism and diamagnetism compete with each other. When increasing the ferromagnetic coupling the spontaneous magnetization occurs in a weak magnetic field. The critical ferromagnetic coupling constant of the paramagnetic phase to ferromagnetic phase transition increases linearly with the temperature. Both the paramagnetism and diamagnetism increase when the magnetic field increases. It reveals the magnetization density $\bar M$ increases firstly as the temperature increases, and then reaches a maximum. Finally the magnetization density $\bar M$ decreases smoothly in the high temperature region. The domed shape of the magnetization density $\bar M$ variation is different from the behavior of Bose gas with ferromagnetic coupling. We also find the curve of susceptibility follows the Curie-Weiss law, and for a given temperature the susceptibility is directly proportional to the Land\'{e} factor.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Study of supercritical power plant integration with high temperature thermal energy storage for flexible operation

The paper presents the recent research in study of the strategies for the power plant flexible operation to serve the requirement of grid frequency control and load balance. The study aims to investigate whether it is feasible to bring the High Temperature Thermal Storage (HTTS) to the thermal power plant steam-water cycle, to identify the suitable thermal charge and discharge locations in the cycle and to test how the HTTS integration can help support grid operation via power plant dynamic mathematical modelling and simulation. The simulation software named SimuEngine is adopted and a 600 MW supercritical coal-fired power plant model is implemented onto the software platform. Three HTTS charging strategies and two HTTS discharging strategies are proposed and tested via the simulation platform. The simulation results show that it is feasible to extract steam from the steam turbine to charge the HTTS, and to discharge the stored thermal energy back to the power generation processes. With the integration of the HTTS charge and discharge processes, the power plant simulation model is also connected to a simplified GB (Great Britain) grid model. Then the study is extended to test the improved capability of the plant flexible operation in supporting the responses to the grid load demand changes. The simulation results show that the power plant with HTTS integration has faster dynamic responses to the load demand changes and, in turn, faster responses to grid frequency services

Feasibility study of energy storage by concentrating/desalinating water : concentrated water energy storage

The paper is to report the work on a preliminary feasibility study of energy storage by concentrating/desalinating water. First, a novel concentrated water energy storage (CWES) is proposed which aims to use off-peak electricity to build the osmotic potential between water bodies with different concentrations, namely brine and freshwater. During peak time, the osmotic potential energy is released to generate electricity. Two scenarios of CWES are specified including a CWES system using reverse osmosis (RO) and pressure retarded osmosis (PRO), and a CWES system co-storing/generating energy and freshwater using “osmotic-equivalent” wastewater. A comprehensive case study is carried out with focusing on the configuration of CWES using RO and PRO. It is found that the limiting cycle efficiency of the CWES using RO and PRO is inversely proportional to the RO water recovery and independent of the initial salinity. Therefore, to balance the energy density and cycle efficiency of CWES, it is recommended to operate a system at lower RO water recovery with higher concentration of the initial solution. Detailed energy analysis of detrimental effects in mass transfer, e.g. concentration polarization and salt leakage, and energy losses of pressurisation and expansion of pressurised water, are studied. Finally, a preliminary cost analysis of CWES is given

An alternative approach to determining average distance in a class of scale-free modular networks

Various real-life networks of current interest are simultaneously scale-free and modular. Here we study analytically the average distance in a class of deterministically growing scale-free modular networks. By virtue of the recursive relations derived from the self-similar structure of the networks, we compute rigorously this important quantity, obtaining an explicit closed-form solution, which recovers the previous result and is corroborated by extensive numerical calculations. The obtained exact expression shows that the average distance scales logarithmically with the number of nodes in the networks, indicating an existence of small-world behavior. We present that this small-world phenomenon comes from the peculiar architecture of the network family.Comment: Submitted for publicactio

Block-regularized 5×\times2 Cross-validated McNemar's Test for Comparing Two Classification Algorithms

In the task of comparing two classification algorithms, the widely-used McNemar's test aims to infer the presence of a significant difference between the error rates of the two classification algorithms. However, the power of the conventional McNemar's test is usually unpromising because the hold-out (HO) method in the test merely uses a single train-validation split that usually produces a highly varied estimation of the error rates. In contrast, a cross-validation (CV) method repeats the HO method in multiple times and produces a stable estimation. Therefore, a CV method has a great advantage to improve the power of McNemar's test. Among all types of CV methods, a block-regularized 5$\times$2 CV (BCV) has been shown in many previous studies to be superior to the other CV methods in the comparison task of algorithms because the 5$\times$2 BCV can produce a high-quality estimator of the error rate by regularizing the numbers of overlapping records between all training sets. In this study, we compress the 10 correlated contingency tables in the 5$\times$2 BCV to form an effective contingency table. Then, we define a 5$\times$2 BCV McNemar's test on the basis of the effective contingency table. We demonstrate the reasonable type I error and the promising power of the proposed 5$\times$2 BCV McNemar's test on multiple simulated and real-world data sets.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, and 5 table