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Advanced Flame Monitoring and Emission Prediction through Digital Imaging and Spectrometry

Cugley, James (2019) Advanced Flame Monitoring and Emission Prediction through Digital Imaging and Spectrometry. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent,. (KAR id:80210)

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Abstract

This thesis describes the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a prototype instrumentation system for burner condition monitoring and NOx emissions prediction on fossil-fuel-fired furnaces.

A review of methodologies and technologies for burner condition monitoring and NOx emissions prediction is given, together with the discussions of existing problems and technical requirements in their applications. A technical strategy, incorporating digital imaging, UV-visible spectrum analysis and soft computing techniques, is proposed. Based on these techniques, a prototype flame imaging system is developed. The system consists mainly of an optical and fibre probe protected by water-air cooling jacket, a digital camera, a miniature spectrometer and a mini-motherboard with associated application software. Detailed system design, implementation, calibration and evaluation are reported.

A number of flame characteristic parameters are extracted from flame images and spectral signals. Luminous and geometric parameters, temperature and oscillation frequency are collected through imaging, while flame radical information is collected by the spectrometer. These parameters are then used to construct a neural network model for the burner condition monitoring and NOx emission prediction.

Extensive experimental work was conducted on a 120 MWth gas-fired heat recovery boiler to evaluate the performance of the prototype system and developed algorithms. Further tests were carried out on a 40 MWth coal-fired combustion test facility to investigate the production of NOx emissions and the burner performance.

The results obtained demonstrate that an Artificial Neural Network using the above inputs has produced relative errors of around 3%, and maximum relative errors of 8% under real industrial conditions, even when predicting flame data from test conditions not disclosed to the network during the training procedure. This demonstrates that this off the shelf hardware with machine learning can be used as an online prediction method for NOx.

Item Type: Thesis (Doctor of Philosophy (PhD))
Thesis advisor: Lu, Gang
Uncontrolled keywords: Image analysis, Burner condition monitoring, Spectrometry, Flame monitoring, Machine learning, Emission prediction.
Subjects: T Technology > T Technology (General)
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Engineering and Digital Arts
Funders: Organisations -1 not found.
SWORD Depositor: System Moodle
Depositing User: System Moodle
Date Deposited: 24 Feb 2020 10:10 UTC
Last Modified: 15 Dec 2022 16:13 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/80210 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Cugley, James.

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