Monitoring of the thermoeconomic performance in an actual combined cycle power plant bottoming cycle

This paper presents a research project carried out by TPG (Thermochemical Power Group) of University of Genoa to develop innovative monitoring and diagnostics procedures and software tools for software-aided maintenance and customer support. This work is concerned with preliminary outcomes regarding the thermoeconomic monitoring of the bottoming cycle of a combined cycle power plant, using real historical data. The software is able to calculate functional exergy flows (y), their related costs (c) (using the plant functional diagram); after that non dimensional parameters for the characteristic exergonomic indexes (Δc, Δc*, Δk*) are determined.