A Neural-Network-Based Method for Ash Fouling Prediction of Heat Transfer Surface in Coal-Fired Power Plant Boiler

Soot blowing optimization and health management of coal-fired power plant boiler has received increasing attention in recent years. The ash fouling monitoring and prediction are the basis for achieve this goal. Nowadays, with the development of neural network technology, the new data-driven methodologies are provided for ash fouling monitoring and prediction. This paper presents a comprehensive method based on neural-network for ash fouling prediction. Firstly, the health factor-clearness factor of the heated surface was established from the actual heat transfer coefficient and the theoretical heat transfer coefficient. Wavelet threshold denoising algorithm will be used as data preprocessing method. Secondly, use Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) to obtain a series of frequency stable parts. Finally, Encoder-Decoder based Attention (EDA) is used to predict the ash deposit on the heat transfer surface. The EDA model consists of an encoder, a decoder and an attention mechanism. The encoder and decoder are composed of Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BI-LSTM) and Long Short-term Memory Network (LSTM) respectively. The function of the attention mechanism is that the output of each time step of the encoder is given a different degree of attention, and it is sent to the decoder as an attention vector after a weighted average operation. Ash accumulation data on the heat transfer surface of various devices are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid model. In addition, the experimental results show that this method has better prediction accuracy than other variant models.