Improving fossil fuel boiler combustion efficiency based on integrating real time simulation with online learning technology

Abstract

Low-carbon economy, environmental concerns and fuel efficiency demands have placed strong emphasis on the fossil fuel based power plants, requiring them to operate at high efficiency. A number of methods have been applied in the power generation industry to improve boiler efficiency and reduce the emission by optimising the combustion process in many power plants. At the same time, computational fluid dynamics-based numerical simulation methods are applied to evaluate the performance of the combustion. However, the frequent variety of fuel quality and changing conditions inside boiler make the efficiency and emission-related combustion problems still occur and plague the electricity generation industry by impairing the boiler efficiency and increase more concerns caused by deteriorated boiler combustion process. This research proposes new methods based on integrating real-time simulation with online learning technology to improve the power plant boiler combustion process.