Power Plant Data Structure Visualization

What it is and how to use this

This is a visualization of the Power Plant data structure as used in this semantic wiki. It is rendered automatically by the Enipedia server using the package graphviz.

Note on graphviz rendering

Note: the layout looks better on my local computer running Ubuntu since it has a newer version of the graph visualization software installed. ChrisDavis 12:53, 23 March 2011 (CET)

You can render this yourself on your Ubuntu machine by first making sure you have graphviz installed:

sudo apt-get install graphviz

and then copying everything in between the graphviz tags into a text file (i.e. Powerplants.dot), and then running

dot -Tpng Powerplants.dot -o Powerplants.png

Power Plant Data Structure (Suggested)

• In pink the objects that (appear) not to have been implemented yet on the forms
• See the currently implemented data structure: (soon old) Power Plant data structure

Form layout

As we make the form more detailed, we may want to look into creating tabbed sections of the form. See here for an example. ChrisDavis 09:40, 1 April 2011 (CEST)

• UPDATE - See here for a page where I'm working out the new layout for the Power Conversion Unit form. ChrisDavis 08:35, 20 April 2011 (CEST)
  • There's an issue with using headers and autocompletion of forms together that causes a fundamental problem, which I need to talk to the developers about before we can roll this out. I'm busy creating a bug report here (last item). ChrisDavis 09:21, 20 April 2011 (CEST)

Revised data structure

On the basis of (expert) user experience and data located on the web on power plants, I (GerardDijkema) have worked on a specification for suggested revision, to meet the following requirements:

• must connect to the terminology used by power systems experts
• must be straightforward to understand, unambiguous
• must seduce people to enter data, even if it is little
• must allow future meaningful queries

As far as content information on power plants is concerned, I suggest we take the Power Generation Unit (PGU) as the key unit of entry

• ON TOP / ENVELOPING a PGU then is the power plant (site).
  • Each power plant (site) has at least on PGU
  • suggest data entry starts with automatically generating 1 PGU per power plant
  • but input on this PGU is from the main power plant page (suspect MOST power plants) are single PGU's
    • Just from looking at the eGrid data for the US, there's 4800 entries for power plants, and 16,000 entries for generators, so average of 3.33 PGU's per plant. By automatically generating 1 PGU, do you mean copying over all the data, or just a subset? ChrisDavis 22:21, 19 April 2011 (CEST)
    • certainly if we consider
      • water - a row of the same type of turbines as one PGU
      • wind - the set of turbines of same type erected as part as a windfarm as one PGU
      • solar - a set of solar panels of same type arranged as part of a solar farm as one PGU
  • Tick-box sinlge PGU power plant (default=yes) TO AVOID ERRORS and facilitate input and data(base) management
    • suggest we include a tick-box on power plant main page: single PGU power plant (with help page attached ? what does this mean)
      • To supplement the help page, we may also want to look at the Terminology extension for MediaWiki. We've used this on the forms of the IE wiki here (scroll down and look for the underlined text). On a compatibility note, this may conflict with the HeaderTabs extension which allows for tabs to be placed on the tops of pages. ChrisDavis 23:13, 19 April 2011 (CEST)
  • on the main page, we display/input Power_Plant_type, which equates to the type of the first PGU (PGU_type)
• possible types are
  • ccgt: gas turbine combined cycle
  • CHP: combined heat and power
  • conv: conventional
  • combi: conventional; gas turbine supplies air
  • engine: diesel or gas engine
  • gt: gas turbine
  • hydro: hydropower
  • IGCC: integrated gasification combined cycle
  • nuclear: nuclear power plant
  • PV: solar photovoltaic
  • solar_CSP: concentrated solar power
  • tick-box: district heating (yes/no)
  • wind: windmill or windfarm
    • Should allow multiple instances for situations like Altamont Pass which has been built up in stages with different types of turbines. ChrisDavis 23:03, 19 April 2011 (CEST)
    • av_windfactor is a property of the physical site, or a property of the turbine itself?
    • I think no_of_turbines should be attached to the PGU (need to use multiple instance templates due to Altamont Pass type situations)
    • ...while model_tag, producer, turbine rating, windmill_type, axis_height, rotor_length should be attached to a Wind_Turbine object ChrisDavis 23:34, 19 April 2011 (CEST)
• using the above, we get the (alphabetically ordered) options in the order where the most popular/occuring incident is listed first/top
  • I suggest that we use tabs on the forms to facilitate entering in the data for these different categories. A simple demo fleshing out the structure is here, and I've already set up the power plant form to split out general and advanced sections here. ChrisDavis 23:13, 19 April 2011 (CEST)
  • conventional and other have different fuel types.
  • for each and every type, there may exist (or autogenerate) underlying pages, allowing input of more specific data?
• on the main page, if we input PGU-type, this automatically fills (or generates) the underlying data sheets for heat source(s) if any.
  • think of dependence with tick-box "single PGU power plant? And of later additions - what happens if we untick this box (default is ticked, some processing when unticked, that can be undone? Must be a logical, unique sequence of unambiguous transactions completed on the database
• on the main page per power plant, I suggest we added (if not single PGU power plant), a table giving an overview of the PGU's.
  • this gives data per PGU, and sums or averages the data where appropriate
  • in addition, people can input site aggregated data (reason: often these will be available, not the individual PGU data)
  • also, we need to think of difference between Descriptive, more or less static data on power plant / PGU, and the PRODUCTION data, that we would like to capture every year (for example).
• I have made the graph to indicate how the detailed information on (thermal) PGU's hangs togehter, i.e. relates to the actual power plant system design:
  • a ccgt has a gas turbine, with its hot exhaust gases sent to a boiler for heat recovery. The generated steam is sent to a steam turbine for power generation. Both gas turbine and steam turbine are connected to a generator, to convert shaft power into electric power.
  • a conventional power plant has a furnace, with an (integrated) boiler, and steam turbine
  • a gas turbine is also used as stand-alone unit, often for backup or peak-hours only (standby, actual operating time limited)
  • an integrated gasification combined cycle is a gasification unit connected ot a ccgt really
• added the information schema for hydropower and wind farms
• changed the label to model_tag (on most equipment)
  • I've removed this, since the model_tag should ideally be the page name to avoid redundancy. ChrisDavis 12:40, 20 April 2011 (CEST)
  • gas turbines do have a well-known model tag (similar to BMW 323, Citroen C3 etc.)
  • furnace and boiler ofter are custom-built
  • steam turbine is a mixture of the two - standard tagged types and custom built
  • generators are usually model_tagged
  • so are windmill turbines(Wikipedia list), PV solar panels
  • hydropower turbines probably also have specific, well-known model_type tags
    • I would suggest changing Hydro_Power to Hydro_Power_Turbine ChrisDavis 23:42, 19 April 2011 (CEST)
• STILL NEED to introduce the combi-unit - conventional gas-fired plants retrofitted with gas turbine(s). Aka CHP with fired boiler.
  • GerardDijkema 17:48, 19 April 2011 (CEST)
  • Done GerardDijkema 15:32, 20 April 2011 (CEST)
• I have slightly changed the representation of the data structure, to make it more clear where we have input data and summed data (on collections of PGU's on a single site). GerardDijkema 15:27, 20 April 2011 (CEST)