China’s First Homemade ‘Intelligent Brain’ for Coal-fired Power Put into Use

On August 19, the iSol, China’s first fully homemade chip-level intelligent distributed control system (iDCS) developed by China Energy, was successfully applied in the 660MW ultra-supercritical coal-fired, air-cooling power unit in Guodian Inner Mongolia Energy Co., Ltd. This marked that China Energy has begun replacing imported distributed control systems with domestically developed ones.

The distributed control system, nicknamed the “core brain” of coal-fired power plants, is key to ensuring stable power supply. For a long time, hardware and software technologies, key chips, operating systems, and CPUs in China’s industrial control field relied on imported products, making the country vulnerable to potential risks. To overcome the challenge, Guodian Inner Mongolia Energy Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of China Energy, joined hands with E-Automation to push forward the application of the iDCS based on homemade chips and key components that they own complete intellectual property rights on its No.2 generating unit.

China has complete intellectual property rights of the renovated iDCS, thus achieving effective control of system safety and avoiding the risk of background data leakage. Moreover, it has evident advantage in technical support, after-sales service response, and smoother communication without language barrier. In addition to homemade operating system and application software, the iDCS has also realized 100 percent replacement of imported key chips by domestically developed ones, thus achieving completely independent controllability. Meanwhile, it performs better than its peers from home and abroad in terms of system network, hardware interference immunity, etc.