Q: What is the UES Suite?A. The UES Suite is an advanced control and real-time optimization package for utilities, industrial energy, and combined heat and power plants. The solution optimizes steam production, electric power generation, and the delivery of heat or steam. It sits as a supervisory layer providing set points to existing plant regulatory control layers.
Q: What are the optimization criteria?A. The optimization criteria include increased boiler thermal efficiency, maintaining emission limits, and economic load allocation of the heat and generation sources.
Q: Are any constraints considered when developing the algorithms?A. The solution factors both technology and environmental constraints that influence the production cycle. Technology constraints include lifetime consumption and asset health, and environment constraints include things like CO and NOx emissions. Fast responsiveness to varying economic conditions is critical for operation in a real-time economy.
Q: What are the components in the UES Suite?A: The UES solution is a modular solution that includes four distinct applications: (1) Advanced Combustion Control, (2) Master Pressure Controller, (3) Economic Load Allocation and (4) Tie Line Control. The modular nature of the solution offers plants the most flexibility to realize process control improvements to the widest range of plant technology set ups, from single boiler, single turbine electric utilities to complex, multi-boiler, multi-header industrial plant boiler houses.
Q: Does this solution work with other Distributed Control Systems (DCSs)?A: Yes. The software components support open control platforms and communication protocols, and can be implemented on a wide range of distributed control systems.
Q: Are the interfaces among the applications compatible?A. Yes. The components are tightly interconnected with a common architecture and compatible interfaces.