Developing steady and dynamic ORP models for mercury emissions control in power plants using WFGD operating data

Abstract

The oxidation-reduction potential (ORP) is highly related to Hg re-emission in wet flue gas desulfurization (WFGD) systems in coal-fired power plants. Developing an accurate model that describes the ORP characteristics is beneficial to achieve the operation optimization of the WFGD system and Hg re-emission reduction. In this paper, steady and dynamic ORP models were reported based on the least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) technique and using operating data acquired from a coal-fired power plant. For the steady model, input parameters consisted of flue gas flow, flue gas temperature, inlet SO2 concentration, oxidation air flow, recycle pump currents, and slurry feed flow. For the dynamic model, in addition to the parameters listed above, time delays of these parameters were also considered in the modeling scheme. Both models achieved high accurate predictions. Model sensitivity analysis was conducted to investigate the influence of the input parameters and time delays on ORP. Results show that the parameters are adequate to describe the characteristics of the ORP. In addition, parametric time delays play an important role to represent the dynamic characteristics of the ORP. These models can be extended to design process control strategy and conduct the ORP operation optimization of the WFGD system in power plants to mitigate Hg re-emission from the scrubber.