A neural network simulator of a gas turbine with a waste heat recovery section

The objective of the paper is to assess the feasibility of the neural netwo rk (NN) approach in power plant process evaluations. A "feed-forward'' tech nique with a back propagation algorithm was applied to a gas turbine equipp ed with waste heat boiler and water heater. Data from physical ol empirical simulators of plant components were used to train such a NN model. Results obtained using a conventional computing technique are compared with those of the direct method based on a NN approach. The NN simulator was able to p erform calculations in a really short computing time with a high degree of accuracy, predicting various steady-state operating conditions on the basis of inputs that can be easily obtained,vith existing plant instrumentation. The optimization of NN parameters like number of hidden neurons, training sample size, and learning I ate is discussed in the paper.