Modular Turbine Control Software: A Control Software Architecture for the ABB Gas Turbine Family

Abstract

ABB Power Generation’s family of gas turbines covers the power range of 35 to 270 MW with five basic turbine types, which vary in size, combustion technology and equipment. Each type comes in several variatons, which in turn can be customized by adding or removing options or by following customer requirements not covered by standard options. This situation imposes high flexibility requirements on the turbine control system software. The scheme presented in this paper was developed to meet these requirements and ease turbine control engineering. It is based on the ideas of object oriented programming, which has been known to be very well suited for this kind of problems in conventional software engineering for quite some time. The architecture which results from this approach not only eases reuse of standard solutions throughout the whole turbine family, the design guidelines based on the object oriented principles also improve stability of the designed code. The concepts presented are currently being implemented for the ABB reference plant product family control system.