Efficient online prediction and correction of 3D combustion temperature field in coal-fired boilers using GDNN

Abstract

Predicting furnace temperature distribution is vital for coal-fired boiler safety. Existing methods, including finite element calculations and three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction still face limitations. A 3D combustion temperature field prediction method, GDNN, which utilizes offline-computed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation results for online reconstructions of entire boiler, was proposed. GDNN method leverages the knowledge of the temperature field acquired by the base neural network model and Gaussian processes. Furthermore, a temperature field correction method is introduced, which employs intermediate variables of the GDNN model and measured values from temperature sensors to establish a correction model for the entire predicted temperature field. We compared GDNN's effectiveness with four well-established algorithms: Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO), Deep Neural Network(DNN), and Radial Basis Function (RBF) network, by also substituting these algorithms as the base model in our proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed prediction method exhibits the highest performance, and the correction method effectively improves the overall results. The optimal parameters for predicting and correcting 3D furnace temperature field results were determined through experimental comparison, and the proposed method was applied to a 350 MW boiler, achieving an error of 2.41%, proving its real-world effectiveness.