Development of a flame monitoring and control system for oxy-coal flames

This paper presents a novel approach to the monitoring and control of oxycoal flames when using high levels of recycled flue gas. Oxycoal combustion is one approach to mitigate the emissions of carbon dioxide from coal fired utility boilers but particularly when retrofitting the technology, the recycle of high levels of flue gas can lead to combustion instability. This paper investigates an approach using three broad band photodiodes to monitor the infra-red, visible and ultra-violet emissions from an individual flame and then by a combustion of signal progressing using the Wigner-Ville transform and artificial neural networks to monitor, diagnose and then suggest control actions to maintain a stable flame that has been demonstrated at pilot scale.