The suspended particulate matter of cooling air easily agglomerated the ash fouling in the finned channel of air cooling condenser (ACC). Its low thermal conductivity severely reduced the transfer performance of ACC

endangered the security and affected the thermal efficiency for direct air cooling (DAC) plant. Aiming at minimizing the year accumulation cost caused by ash fouling

a new optimization algorithm of optimal cleaning cycle of ACC was presented in this paper based on product loss and cleaning maintenance costs. Then

by jointing the cost of redundant area of ACC

an evaluation and calculation model of ash fouling cost was established. Based on the ACC parameters of 600 MW DAC power plant

the drop rate prediction model of ash fouling resistance was established by the experiment data of site online monitoring. The example analysis results showed that the best cleaning cycle was 28.3 d and the annual cleaning frequency was 8 times for the 600 MW DAC plant

and then

the annual ash fouling cost of unit capacity plant was 4528.3 yuan·MW-1·a-1. According to the national installed capacity of 143 million kW in 2014

the annual accumulation cost of ash fouling was as much as 648 million yuan·a-1 for our whole country. Compared with the site operation condition of annual cleaning 2 times

the ash fouling cost can be saved 2868.1 yuan·MW-1·a-1 and the annual accumulation eliminable cost was 410 million yuan·a-1.