Build Digital Twins for Smart Upgrading of Thermal Power Plants: A Practical Framework

Towards the initiative of industrial modernization in recent years, this paper proposed a practical framework for thermal power plants, in which digital twins are built for smart upgrading purposes, including in-situ visualization, optimizing control, fault alarming, and life cycle management. The framework is consisted of inherent parts from a normal thermal power plant, and additional parts for smart upgrading. By the body mapping, process mapping, and control mapping between the original layer and cloned twin layer, different types of data are combined to optimize the operation and maintenance. Key techniques like building information modeling and fast computational fluid dynamics simulation, along with the hardware such as graphic processing units for parallel computing, and advanced sensors for measurements of high efficiency, are essentials to implement this framework into a real thermal power plant.