W.S.G. Isaac Newton

The goal that was worked towards during this project, is creating a plant monitor that allows its users to collect, view, correlate, and analyse both live and historical data coming from one of the biomass combustion plants owned by HoSt. The acquisition of this kind of information would allow HoSt to greatly optimize the process efficiency and thus cost of energy generation. Not only is the plant monitor useful for the plants that are owned by HoSt. Once the plant monitor is finalized, other companies could potentially buy the monitoring and the software as a service provided by HoSt. It had been determined that Power BI is a suitable program for the development of the plant monitor. A standard interface format had to be built into Power BI before all desired data could be implemented. To achieve this, several experienced colleagues were asked to give feedback to an initial crude interface design. After some feedback meetings with different people, which lead to several iterations of the interface, a final interface was built with all necessary functionality available to allow for the implementation of raw data coming from the biomass plant. Some items had then been implemented into the plant monitor. O2 and CO concentration in the furnace, and several pressure drop items in the flue gas duct were implemented among other items. Recommendations had been made to help the future developer improve the current concepts.